Searching for compatible OMV Raspberry Pi 3 network adapater

Zitat von Mic2000

I do found an article that some guy using a RP2 with a gigabit adapter got an increase from 10-12MB/s tot 45MB/s

BS. Impossible with Raspberry Pi's insanely crippled USB implementation. And you have to keep in mind that there's only one single USB2 connection on every Raspberry so while you get better looking iperf3 / network numbers NAS throughput is always slow as hell since every single byte has to pass the 'one single USB2 OTG port' bottleneck twice.

Just do a search for rtl8153 site:forum.openmediavault.org to get the idea. By using an RTL8153 (only recommendation! The only other ASIX alternative is not worth a look!) you might get close to twice the read speeds as normal (Fast Ethernet) and maybe 3 times better write performance if amount of data does not exceed ~500MB (since the you can transfer at GbE/USB2 speeds to the RPi buffering data in RAM until it gets flushed to disk).

Raspberries are worst case choice for a NAS. Always. That being said I added support for the two popular GbE Ethernet dongles with latest official OMV iamge for Raspberries. Both RTL8153 (the only true recommendation since best performance and also cheap) and ASIX AX88179 (only alternative but better choose the RealTek thingie) work out of the box with OMV on Raspberries. But the performance gain is laughable.

Zitat von Mic2000

using a gigabit adapter on a raspberry pi: jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-ge…etting-gigabit-networking

I know Jeff's work since he's usually doing a great job. But he speaks of '321 Mbits/sec (40 MB/sec)' (you won't exceed this since here you run in an USB2 Hi-Speed limitation, same with RTL8153) and his observation 'switching to a Gigabit adapter almost doubled the throughput' is also true for NAS/OMV use cases. While you will see nice numbers like 40MB/s with useless synthetic benchmarks due to Raspberry Pi's USB bottleneck real world NAS performance won't be 3-4 times faster but not even doubled.

With latest OMV image for Raspberries you get ~10MB/s and with such an GbE dongle just ~18MB/s: Building OMV automatically for a bunch of different ARM dev boards

So buying an RTL8153 thingie to be used with a Raspberry Pi won't improve performance much but since at least RTL8153 works really great on USB3 ports (can fully saturate GBit Ethernet -- we're talking here about ~940MBits/sec) it's not wrong to buy such a thing anyway.

Zitat von flmaxey

I'm sensing a sort of,, love / hate relationship..

Not at all

While I really don't like the RPi Foundation (especially the numerous fairy tales they tell) the Raspberries starting with 2nd gen are great toys for many different use cases. I also don't see what's wrong with improving OMV situation for Raspberries and there focussing on RPi's Achilles' heel (the shitty/stupid Micro USB connector for DC-IN) since if you happen to already own one and are fine with insanely low performance there's nothing wrong with using an RPi 2 or 3 as a low-end NAS.

But I think it's only fair to elaborate about the NAS performance bottleneck every RPi is affected from and also to elaborate on why most benchmark numbers don't tell the truth (GbE USB dongle in this case, iperf numbers look nice but real-world performance will suck). Literally every other SBC out there shows better NAS performance since not plagued by the 'one single USB2 connection' bottleneck.

Wrt efforts spent on Raspberries you shouldn't forget that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants (Armbian) and combining a freshly created Armbian rootfs with bootloader+kernel for Raspberries isn't exactly rocket science. Integrating my work done on under-voltage/throttling for Raspberries was the most time consuming part (no one is aware of of course since most people will never have a look into /var/log/raspihealth.log or raspimon output anyway) but this still doesn't change a bit wrt Raspberries as NAS being the worst choice always

BTW: That was one of my main motivations starting to contribute to Armbian since I want to decide solely based on hardware features which small ARM board I use for a specific project trusting in Armbian running on all of them and providing the same environment everywhere (and now our work spread even over to Raspberries funnily)

Zitat von flmaxey

Will your tweaks (Armhf Debian, etc.), download and install? Or, as I suspect, will I need to reconfig my setup with the new image?

The latter since it's an entirely new image (ARMv7 vs. ARMv6, now upstream Debian armhf vs. Raspbian before).

ROCK64 has just started to ship and in maybe one week first real end-users will have it in their hands. Wrt software development currently everything happens here https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build and here https://jenkins.ayufan.eu/job/linux-build-rock-64/ -- OMV images are already part of the automated build process and all the Armbian/OMV optimizations are also included. So this might be the first time ever that as soon as a new SBC ships there's already a highly optimized OMV image for the device available. But at least my dev sample is plagued by a strange bug making USB3 inaccessible after booting (can only be fixed by reboot now). Maybe it's a hardware issue...

The other cheap and even more suitable device I've lying around and are working on is the ESPRESSOBin. Real and pretty fast SATA there (so no USB3 connector/cable hassles), sane power design (12V combined with step-down converters on the board) and due to the available mPCIe slot the ability to add 2 or even 4 more SATA ports (ASM1062 or Marvell 88SE9215 based, some test results for the latter).

And no, Pine64 and ROCK64 are totally incompatible. It's all about the SoC used on these boards. You get a Pine64 image working easily on any other board that uses the same SoC (Allwinner A64) since then it's always just exchanging hardware descriptions (device tree) and sometimes exchanging the bootloader (needed for different types of DRAM eg. DDR3 vs LPDDR3)

Another sbc to consider are the odroids, the xu4 and hc1 both have gigabit and the xu4 has usb3 vs sata on the hc1.

Zitat von GeekGrrl

the xu4 and hc1 both have gigabit and the xu4 has usb3 vs sata on the hc1.

The XU4 due to some severe USB3 hassles is IMO not a good NAS choice (see my signature) but fortunately Hardkernel fixed all these issues with HC1. They sent me a developer sample and a mini review is already online: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/4983-odroid-hc1/ (using the XU4 OMV image is possible and the correct one since all the relevant hardware is 100% compatible)