So I am a LANTech at a school now and we have a bunch of extra Chromebooks which have been deprovisioned and decom’d and need to be discarded. There are several broken ones (in one way or another) that I may be able to get my hands on. Here is my plan:
Use MrChromebookTech UEFI installer script to get a full UEFI on - I have done this
Install Ubuntu (not sure if I should go with server or desktop)
Use it as a NAS if I can
It is low power, has a battery included if I want to use it, has a few cores and 4GB of memory with a 32GD eMMC chip so OS install and performance is good enough I believe.
What it does NOT have is any SATA ports of course but it has two USB-C ports that are either 5GB or 10GB. These would be plenty for my usage in terms of throughput but I would like to have 4-6 drives connected at once if possible.
Any suggestions?
I love nothing more than making e-waste into sketchy servers so it’ll be a fun ride either way but I am a bit stumped as to how to get lots of storage, albeit slow storage, in here.
Should I just use sketchy USB hub with a few external drive interfaces attached? Is there something better?
NAS on wifi? Are you planning a usb card?
A reputable usb hub and that’s it… plus an eth card and drives depending on what you have… Whether they will be bare drives only with a adapter or inserted additionally into a disk enclosure does not matter.
Is it doable, yes. Will it be stable and fast…
Alternatively, think of a DAS box but it won’t be cheap…
4-6 pieces of usb-c adapters to sata or enclosures … even more expensive when it comes to 3.5, and finally DAS.
Personally, I wouldn’t spend money on such a NAS, unless $ is not a problem and you just want to play with it. 
You can also experiment with a sata hub and connect it via a sata-usb adapter.
But it’s still basically the same as before, only we change the ratio of sata vs usb.
In the first option, each hdd has its sata-usb adapter, which we plug into the usb-hub, in the second option, we connect the hdd to the sata hub, then hub to the sata-usb adapter.
I like these: https://icybox.de/en/product.php?id=175 you can daisy chain them to get e.g. 10-15 drives per usb-c port if you need lots of cheap storage.
It’s not cheap, (+60 per drive, only makes sense with 18/20T drives) but has a fan for cooling, power supply and a bunch of metal to make everything sturdy.
I haventy used a SATA hub, that may well be something to look at. I was thinking of going with your second drawing there, a usb hub to several sata-usb adaptors such as with these:
and a few of these:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usbc+to+sata&crid=1SEEU0BE10BP8&sprefix=usb+to+sata%2Caps%2C123&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
however then my concern was powering the drives and I am guessing that I would only be able to use 2.5" SSD’s and couldn’t use 3.5" spinners but I guess that would depend on power draw of the drive and if the hub chosen could power a big spinners along with the Chromebook motherboard itself
To be sure, I’m not ooking for five 9’s haha, but I just HATE to see these perfectly good motherboards go to e-waste. My thought was if I could get the hub and a few adapters then take everything out of its plastic enclosure then I could 3D print a few carriers to hold the electronics and find an inexpensive small case to bolt that into.
Basically I guess whatI am getting at is, after watching Craft Computing’s YT video on a Terramaster NAS I thought to myself I wonder if I could get one of these Chromebook motherboards to do most of the same (dual core celerons however) and just run either Ubuntu or TrueNas on it if that makes sense.
The IcyBox unit is promising as it is basically what I need and could 3D print a way to attach the MoBo onto the back of it so that connections aren’t exposed but that fella is $400-ish.
I wonder if I could do the same thing for say $300 WITH the motherboard since it is e-waste.
this helps a lot - I think my concerns are with powr delivery and what case to use and how to use it.
If I could buy JUST a backplane PCB that accepts the drives with a USB-C interface on the other end (powered somehow, not sure about that part) then I’d be good to go but I haven’t found that yet
some dumb questions…
I would guess that using a SATA multiplexer board with a single USBC-SATA adapter would be slower than using several USBC-SATA adapters and a USBC hub since the SATA multiplexer would be the bottleneck limiting us to 6Gbps whereas we could theoretically get the 10Gbps doing it with a USB hub instead…what do yall think…??
The other thing I am wondering is if this would work in place of the WiFi card slot:
if THAT’s the case then BOY that makes things easier - then I just figure out power and use an adaptor for wired ethernet which I will have to use anyways as I wont be using the wifi…but I wonder if this NGFF connection would work in the wifi slot of a former HP Chromebook 11 G8 or if the SATA protocol can talk through that connection or not.
strike that - I am pretty sure it would need to be the NFHK NGFF one mentioned there which states only one SATA port but then shows two ports in the image. Maybe I could use THAT with a multiplexer but no idea if that would support PM mentioned above…
hmmm…
I wish i COULD afford to just buy like two of each of these things and see what works but low cost is key. Given that the server part of it if you will, the mobo/ram/emmc/cpu is cost free I really feel like there must be a way to get gigiabit speeds with this by using some adapters for say four drives but I just think I havent hit the right recipe yet. Case will be the last thing as it will depend on adapters/boards/psu and power supply will depend on how it is configured of course but I really feel like I should be able to get this to under $300, perhaps even under $200 excluding drives…so for me its sort of the challenge of it
PS…in the past I took a dual core 1024MB walmart tablet, rooted it, installed NTFS-3G and an FTP server and made a working wireless server for a single USB OTG connected external HDD and it totally worked through wifi…it was slow as hell and stupid, very stupid, so this here genuinely isnt my WORST idea, but getting it to $200-$300 sans storage is looking like my main pain
Sorry for writing to much - thinking out loud.
I may go with this case:
along with this hub:
then buy four of these:
then one of each of these:
then id have gigabit ethernet using the NGFF to mini PCIE then mini PCIE to ethernet, I would have three drives using USB 3.0 (or four drives if one of them goes through a USB 2.0 port), I would have video output without needing an edp to hdmi board, I would have an extra USB port for keyboard/mouse, and id even have an SD card slot that would be burie and id never use.
Whattya think? messy for sure…but it could work…?
I mean, you could get a cheap psu for like $50 to power a few sata HDDs, fold cardboard and duct tape creatively to keep a bunch of 3.5" in place.
There’s cheaper cases than that 10Gbps icydock … (what’s fantec called in the us?)
Also, you could grab 2 small pieces of acrylic, drill screw holes in the right place and sandwich the drives
Do you have the drives? - what drives are you looking to be using?
so I dont have drives - sorta - I can grap four SSDs from school to use for POC to see if it all works together electronically and then go from there when I get a chance to buy spinning disks with some real space on them. I am thinking that since I have to use a USB-C power supply to power the mobo that I will use one of the molex power supplies and just have two bricks inside of the case - one for the mobo and ethernet using a passthrough adapter and the other powering just the drives with a power switch switching both of them on the 120V side so that only one power cord goes into the case then to two internal bricks…
then use a pair of adapters on the wifi slot - one to go from ngff to mini-pcie and another to go from mini-pcie to four port sata
sorry this keeps chanigng i know, there are SO many possible ways to do this but the thing I have to find out is whether or not I can use these adapters or if I will need to use hubs which I think I would rather not do
If i can send all of the data through the wifi slot then that frees up the USB C ports for other good stuff so I am leaning that way at the moment…
You could get a riser and stick a 9201-8i or 8e or something and hook it up to a norco or chenbro jbod enclosure and get 100s or terabytes of storage that way…
…
but … the drives are 250-300 a pop, … it’s questionable what exactly is it you’re wasting or not wasting by installing Samba on those Chromebooks.
… i.e. of course it could be a nas
Powering 6 hdd 2.5 from one usb can also be a challenge, but 3.5 is out of the question.
Buy a usb HUB that is powered, has its own power supply, then connecting 2.5 is not a problem, provided that the hub is able to provide per port / in total as much as 6 hdd 2.5 need.
In the case of 3.5 you need to buy 6 dedicated cases that will have their own power supplies. There are also theoretically available adapters for 3.5 but probably less popular.
Only slowly financially in the case of 3.5 we are approaching DAS, which is a nice integrated box as opposed to 6 pieces separately 3.5 hdd.
It’s doable to do what you want, but it will cost money.
The cheapest will be with 2.5 and a cheap usb hub, and still be prepared with at least $100.
In the case of 3.5 it will be more expensive, much more expensive because more power is needed.
Finally you have DAS which is a nicely packaged and powered solution for both 2.5 and 3.5 that you want to build but it costs $$$.
There is no magical cheap solution here… building such a NAS can be solved in several ways, although all of them will be very similar to each other and still cost very similar amounts.
Within $250 you will find some cheap DAS… So the question is whether it makes sense to make life difficult for yourself.
With DAS, you only need to connect one usb-c cable to this computer and that’s it, of course, a network card.
For $220 you have 8 places for hdd, and esata, unfortunately only usb 3.0 but it should probably be enough …
You have a nice box, power supply, fans, communication, and you only + to this e-waste what you have.
Theoretically yes, in practice I doubt you’d be able to reach the ceiling. One of the problems I’ve always observed with USB is how data is handled. USB HUBs like to clog up especially when all drives are under heavy load. Cheap hubs also do not cope with the even division of the band per device. What at the time meant that one device can almost block communication with another… yes, the faster the usb, this problem decreases.
Well well, Mr. Wendell just did a video that was basically about this - and it was great!
I also recently bought an adapter for dual SATA to M.2 WiFi with the USB somehow included in there? Not sure I understand the form factor totally but I’ll post on whether or not that works once I have power dist sorted out.
P.S. - I HAVE been running one of these with two USB 2.5in drives plugged in to USBA and it’s been great with Ubuntu Server 22.04, very reliable and quick enough with the USBC gig lan adapter so the comments above worked great…I’d still like to find a way to do it without using all USB drives though if possible, I’d like to try to get SATA piped directly into this thing, so that’s why I’m working on. But to be sure, using USBA to SATA adapters with 2.5 SSDs was GREAT!
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