Radxa's Taco Turns the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Into a Dual-Ethernet Five-Bay NAS
With both gigabit and 2.5-gig-E connectivity, five drive bays, and acceleration support, the Taco is a tasty treat for CM4 users.
Radxa has launched a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, designed to turn it into a fully-functional five-bay network attached storage (NAS) system with network appliance capabilities: the Radxa Taco.
"Radxa Taco is a complete NAS/router solution design based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4," the company explains of its tasty-sounding carrier board. "It utilizes the high-speed PCIe buses on [the] CM4 for ultra-fast network connectivity and storage IO."
The board, which accepts any model of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 system-on-module, includes five SATA-and-power connectors on its underside designed to accept 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives or solid-state drives (SSDs). Two Ethernet ports are included, one using the CM4's native gigabit Ethernet and the other a 2.5-gig-E chip, alongside a full-size HDMI port, a USB 2.0 port, and a microSD slot for storage should you use a CM4 model, which lacks on-board eMMC.
Elsewhere on the board is a battery-backed real-time clock, an M.2 E-key slot for optional communication or acceleration modules, and an M.2 M-key for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage — though this latter feature comes with the warning that it doesn't support use as the boot drive for the Raspberry Pi's operating system. An optional heatsink and fan assembly, meanwhile, keeps the CM4 cool, with a connector provided for a pulse-width modulated (PWM) fan to cool the storage devices too.
The Taco isn't Radxa's first shot at a Raspberry Pi-powered NAS: three years ago the company unveiled the Rock Pi SATA HAT family, a series of Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) boards with up to five SATA ports for NAS projects — though the Raspberry Pi-compatible models topped out at four drives, with a Rock Pi 4 board required for the top-end Penta SATA HAT.
More information on the Taco is available on the Radxa wiki, with ALLNET China taking orders at $95 board-only, without power supply or heatsink.