<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>wlll</author><text>All computers are NAS if you stick S on them and A them to an N, the Raspberry pi is no different, but it&amp;#x27;s got a great advantage in that it&amp;#x27;s small and relatively power efficient. I turned a Dell Optiplex USFF into a NAS (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;willj.net&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;fitting-two-hard-drives-and-an-ssd-in-a-dell-optiplex-7010-usff&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;willj.net&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;fitting-two-hard-drives-and-an-ssd-i...&lt;/a&gt;) but in the same space I could easily fit 4+1 disks instead of the 2+1 if I was using a far smaller motherboard.&lt;p&gt;As for being underpowered, again it depends what you are doing with them. For my NAS (basically long-term storage of stuff I don&amp;#x27;t access much and tiemmachine backups) there would be plenty of CPU, the biggest problem would be memory.&lt;p&gt;*edit* Just to be clear, the Pi has some &lt;i&gt;massive&lt;/i&gt; drawbacks as a NAS at present because of it&amp;#x27;s significant lack of disk IO, but there&amp;#x27;s nothing inherent in it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;form factor&lt;/i&gt; that makes it a bad NAS. If I could have plugged 2+ HDs into one in a performant way I&amp;#x27;d likely have done that rather than the Dell Optiplex shenanigans.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jon-wood</author><text>If you want a NAS, buy a NAS. I really don’t get people’s desire to take an underpowered single board computer and try to turn it into a useful server. There are absolutely places where a Raspberry Pi makes sense, those places are where you’ve got electronics you want to interface with complex software that can’t viably be run on a smaller MCU.</text></item><item><author>harvie</author><text>I would be totally happy with PCIe based hat that has PCIe to SATA interface with 4-6 SATA ports (with at least one of them being bootable). I know SATA SSDs are not newest, coolest nor fastest. But for home NAS setup i would find it totaly acceptable. Unlike the USB port sacrificing and &amp;quot;loopback&amp;quot; USB cable mess that is usualy used by older raspberries in order to mount SATA drives.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/nvme-ssd-boot-raspberry-pi-5</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>harvie</author><text>Pi has superior long term support and even better community support. Loads of options for upgrades and extensions should you need one in the future. Also once i decide that i don&amp;#x27;t need that NAS anymore, because the pi would be obsolete or slow in the future, i can just take that pi out and use it for some other DIY project.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jon-wood</author><text>If you want a NAS, buy a NAS. I really don’t get people’s desire to take an underpowered single board computer and try to turn it into a useful server. There are absolutely places where a Raspberry Pi makes sense, those places are where you’ve got electronics you want to interface with complex software that can’t viably be run on a smaller MCU.</text></item><item><author>harvie</author><text>I would be totally happy with PCIe based hat that has PCIe to SATA interface with 4-6 SATA ports (with at least one of them being bootable). I know SATA SSDs are not newest, coolest nor fastest. But for home NAS setup i would find it totaly acceptable. Unlike the USB port sacrificing and &amp;quot;loopback&amp;quot; USB cable mess that is usualy used by older raspberries in order to mount SATA drives.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/nvme-ssd-boot-raspberry-pi-5</url></story>