Open Source NAS Helios4 Is Back!

By on July 26, 2018
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Kobol fell short of its previous $110K funding goal on Kickstarter, but it fulfilled the last of its Kickstarter orders in January. The company is now running its own funding campaign to manufacture a second 500-unit batch.

Now there’s a Helios4 Basic Kit for $176.12 that includes the SBC only and a Full Kit with SBC, fans, and 4x SATA bays for $194.46. Both ship with 2GB of DDR3L ECC RAM.
The 100 x 100mm Helios4 SBC is equipped with the Marvell Armada 388, a dual Cortex-A9, 1.6GHz SoC with cryptographic and XOR DMA engines. The Armada 388 and 2GB of error-correcting DDR3L are made available via a SolidRun MicroSoM A388.

The SBC provides 4x SATA 3.0 ports, 4x SATA cables and 2x Molex interfaces to dual SATA power cable. The design enables up to 48TB storage. The Helios4 SBC is further equipped with 2x USB 3.0 ports, a full-duplex GbE port, a microSD slot, and a mini-USB-to-serial port for console.

Other features include I2C, GPIO, control panel, and PWM fan headers. A DC jack connects to 12V/8A adapter, and there are HDD power connectors and a reset button.

The Full Kit adds a translucent case, an assembly kit, and 2x 70mm PWM ball bearing fans. Schematics and mechanical specs are available for the Helios4 hardware, and schematics can be downloaded for the MicroSoM A388 module.

On software side, the SBC is supported by Armbian Linux distro which provides Debian and Ubuntu based images.

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