Kobol to release ‘open source NAS’ with five bays

A Singapore company will start shipping the Helios64, a five-bay open-spec NAS system, in March. The company wants to release as much technical data about the system as possible and offer support for open source software.

Kobol reports that it will take pre-orders for the Helios64 starting next week and that it will ship the product from the end of March. It is a five-bay nas with a nano-itx motherboard of 120x120mm with a Rockchip RK3399 hexacore. The storage device contains 4GB lpddr4 and 16GB emmc storage.

There are five SATA 3.0 connections, an M2 slot, 2.5Gbit and 1Gbit Ethernet, USB-C and three USB 3.0 ports. A micro SD card reader, a built-in power supply and a range of I/O interfaces such as gpio, i2c, spi and uart are also present. The price of a complete NAS is $295, but users can also purchase just the motherboard for $189 if they want to build their own system. The manufacturer will also offer a mini-itx adapter kit “for people who want to recycle an old PC that they have lying around.”

Kobol already introduced the Helios4 last year. This was a DIY motherboard based kit with a Marvell Armada 388 processor. According to LinuxGizmos, Kobol initially had problems producing the Helios4, but delivery started in August last year. Among other things, the company published documentation on how users could install Arch Linux ARM and OpenMediaVault on the system. That model is now end-of-life.