As sad as this is, I find it very refreshing with a transparent and honest update like this. I've seen so many initially promising hardware projects just fizzle out in uncertainty and radio silence.

Especially that they are open with reasons why, what they feel they could have done better, and releasing blueprints allowing others to pick up.

No doubt 2020/2021 must have been the most challenging years in decades for an indie team to launch a new hardware project like this.

I was looking quite seriously at the Kobol64 last year; the only thing that eventually made me not preorder was realizing the RAM would not be sufficient for my purposes (ZFS-backed Glusterfs nodes).

Sad to see it end, but I appreciate the honesty.

One of the huge challenges with building niche, enthusiast hardware is that you have fewer resources than a bigger company, yet enthusiast customers tend to be far more demanding than normal. The Helios products look fantastic, but even in this HN thread you can see potential customers explaining why they wanted more out of the product (Mostly RAM). I have a feeling their fate would have been a lot of people agreeing it was a cool product but then going off and buying something else after doing some research.

ARM boards are hard right now because we’re not quite to the point of powerful, high-RAM systems being affordable, so most things are a compromise. In retrospect, I wish they would have applied their obviously fantastic product engineering skills to building an awesome NAS case first that accepted a standard Mini-ITX board. From there, they could have partnered with a Nano-ITX board vendor to offer a smaller V2, then as they picked up momentum they could branch into the custom all-in-one solution. Trying to jump straight to a full custom product from top to bottom is extremely hard, to say the least.

The Kobol Team did a much better job than any of the other ARM Vendors with their devices. The Wiki always detailed EVERY PART of the Hardware and their devices ran mainline kernel the day i bought them. I have come to hate almost every other ARM Device because at the end of the day the software support was only good enough when the hardware was already dying of old age. It's a little easier with no GPU to support though.

That being said, Kobos never delivered quality hardware. My Helios4 died, likely the PSU, early Helios64 needed a botch job for their LAN Ports to work correctly and they never delivered on the ECC RAM needed for a NAS. Performance on the Helios4 was also absolutely crappy, never being able to deliver gigabit speeds over the LAN Port. I wish them all the best though, my personal hardware is going to be x86 for the foreseeable future unless ARM makes MAJOR strides in terms of linux compatibility

Sad news indeed, the Helios64 was promising although some users reported instability issues, but after some work it could have become a killer product. It's all Open Source though, so hopefully other people can join and take over the development/production, also showing in the process one more example (do we still need them?) why Open Source is the better choice.

Nooo. I really wanted a Helios64. Good luck to the team and I hopefully someone can create a similar product.

That is really sad. The products looked really good and I had the feeling they were targeted at a very interesting niche that definitely needs to be covered.

Does anyone know of a similar product? I'm particularly impressed by the built in UPS and five bay storage.

This feels like the 80/20 rule in action. These boards mostly work but had (in my experience) non-trivial reliability and quality issues and they would have been expensive and tricky to get fully right.

The cynic in my says another company will probably pop up shortly with a new Icarus128 NAS board.

It seems like hardware could benefit a lot from more standardization. One of the big problems with a hardware project like this is that parts aren't fully interchangeable and therefore redesigns are necessary for minor part changes. If hardware parts were commodities instead of unique products with unique requirements, it would be a lot easier to handle supply chain disruptions.

And supply chain disruptions have been so extremely painful in the past year, why doesn't the industry do this? It seems like if you could provide guarantees about interchangeability, that translate to guarantees about availability, people would be willing to pay a premium.

Cant blame them. There are no end in sight with component shortage. I mean within the NAS market, if Synology and Qnap are having trouble with supply. It is quite literally impossible to get anything done during these difficult time with the small volume they are making.

Rather than hoping or praying things will change ( it wont ), I do appreciate their honest take on the issue.

Very sad news, I was looking forward to the ECC variant.

What's the smallest ECC NAS board on the market right now?

Thank you Kobol team - sad to see it end, but love the candour and wish you all the best.

I ended up getting the Helios64 as it fitted both my needs pretty well and got to support an amazing project - hopefully the community can live on and help each other out!

That's a real shame. I have a Helios64 that has been rock solid since launch and I was thinking of getting another one if they ever became available again.

Thank you Kobol team and thank you for the openness and transparency the whole time.

Still running my original Helios4. Hasn't missed a beat for 4+ years.

Wish the team good luck in their new endeavors. You definetly had me impressed.