Which energy efficient ARM platform to choose?

  • Wrt transcoding: it should be possible to run this stuff HW accelerated on the SoC's video engine of Rockchip boards or Exynos 5422 ODROIDs but I lost track about the progress being made there...

    Thanks, hmm, maybe ODROID HC2 is also good choice, I think I can install 2x2.5 HDD in its case. 2nd hdd connect to USB and use for backups.

  • I heard also about the Raspberry Pi 3 about slow SMB share speed.

    It's not slow 'SMB share speed' but slow networking in general. Raspberry Pis use either Fast Ethernet (slow as hell -- this is what we were using last century) or the slowest Wi-Fi implementation possible today. Due to the chosen platform you can't fix this in any reasonable way: Raspberry PI / OMV... ethernet or wifi? -- the only way to 'fix' low network performance with any Raspberry Pi is to replace the Pi with something more suitable for the job.


    That said: silly Samba settings can of course add further to horribly low performance. With some random Linux distros for your RPi SMB performance might be way lower compared to our OMV image.

  • raid 1 is to difficult.


    O think I buy a 2.5 inch hdd, i don't which one provides good performance and is reliable.


    But which sbc board is a drama, you have so many.


    I want good data tranfer between my network at home.


    I also want to buy a second hdd to create backups of the disk what I am going to connect to the sbc. But which one to buy?


    Also which SD card to buy. And how to backup this

  • which sbc board

    The recommendations here are still valid: Which energy efficient ARM platform to choose? (for the performance numbers RPi is the baseline, so if you read '3 to 4 times faster' then it's just that compared to a Raspberry Pi).



    Also which SD card to buy

    Today definitely only those any more that carry either A1 or A2 logo: https://forum.armbian.com/topi…ab=comments#comment-49811


    If you're smart you're buying larger capacities than 'needed' (since then the card lasts longer and e.g. a 16 GB SanDisk Ultra A1 costs 10 bucks while the 32GB variant costs just 3 bucks more and is even slightly faster!) and you buy more than one card so you can clone your installation from time to time to a 2nd or even 3rd card.

  • Thank you, which harddisk do you recommend for me for data storage and for the backup?


    How do you clone your SD Card:
    From internet:
    Clone directly from drive to drive, use thiscommand:
    dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/target bs=1M
    Alternatively, if you have enough space on yourinternal drive, you could create an image first, making creation of multiplecopies easier:
    dd if=/dev/source of=/home/me/image.img bs=1M
    Then, use the image to create clones:
    dd if=/home/me/image.img of=/dev/target bs=1M


    Is this is the good method?


    If so, how automate this every day 1 times?

  • @tkaiser have you tested the Orange PI PC2?

    Nope. I got one of the first dev samples over a year ago but only took some pictures and sent it immediately to another german dev nearby who is a DRAM wizard and implemented open source DRAM initialization within weeks (since the vendor's own software was full of BLOBs and horrible as usual).


    But there's nothing to test since it's all about the SoC: Allwinner H5. All H5 boards perform almost identical and as long as they are equipped with Gigabit Ethernet the only performance relevant differences are:

    • Voltage regulation for the CPU cores (this affects how high clockspeeds can be adjusted. OPi PC 2 can clock stably up to almost 1.4 GHz while NanoPi NEO2 for example is limited to 912 MHz since only fed with 1.1V core voltage)
    • Type and amount of DRAM: the small H5 boards like NanoPi NEO 2, NEO Plus 2 and Orange Pi Plus Zero all use a single channel config with just 512 MB while the larger H5 devices use dual channel and up to 2 GB DRAM

    Unlike with the 32-bit H3 boards where single vs dual channel DRAM has a huge impact on memory performance the memory controller in H5 is different and performance differences are negligible. So simply check the links to linux-sunxi wiki and there the device pages since we try to describe each board as good as possible ('we' -- this time speaking of linux-sunxi community). But for whatever reasons three more interesting H5 devices are missing there: NEO Plus 2, NEO Core2 (you need to add your own MagJack for Gigabit Ethernet or buy their 'Mini Shield') and NanoPi M1 Plus 2 (hmm... seems they stopped development after sending dev samples to us Armbian developers almost a year ago)


    Anyway: as long as it's H5 with Gigabit Ethernet (controller in the SoC and always just combined with an external RTL8211E PHY) you only need to look at the amount of DRAM which more or less defines the price range starting with 15 bucks for the OPi Zero Plus with 512MB and ending with Orange Pi Prime (2GB) for twice as much.

  • @tkaiser or somebody else?


    You forgot my question...


    Your knowledge can solve my brainpain.


    Or was this text also meant for me:
    "Anyway: as long as it's H5 with Gigabit Ethernet (controller in the SoC and always just combined with an external RTL8211E PHY) you only need to look at the amount of DRAM which more or less defines the price range starting with 15 bucks for the OPi Zero Plus with 512MB and ending with Orange Pi Prime (2GB) for twice as much."

  • I'm planning to replace my bananapi m1 based OMV NAS with something more efficient and fast.


    Basically I need to add an 8TB hdd to the existing one (3TB) and I read a lot of posts from tkaiser discouraging the use of SATA multiplier as well as various tests on different SBC's ended up on advise against A20 based NAS for a lot of good reasons!


    That said, I really never had any issue with my current configuration but now I need to add an HDD so I'd like to step forward to something more fast. After reading this (and a lot of other) post, I'm oriented to the Rock64 solution, with suggested cable but I have a doubt: the usb3 to sata cable allows 1 HDD and the board have only 1 usb3 port available, so how can I do to connect two different disks without compromise performances?


    Don't know if it's relevant but both disks I need to attach are WD RED.

  • I'm oriented to the Rock64 solution, with suggested cable but I have a doubt: the usb3 to sata cable allows 1 HDD and the board have only 1 usb3 port available, so how can I do to connect two different disks without compromise performances?

    With an JMS561 for example: Which energy efficient ARM platform to choose?


    Please be aware that some of those JMS561 things have a broken firmware that does not allow to easily access SMART data from the 2nd disk but the boards from the specific eBay link doesn't suffer from this problem according to another Rock64 user who uses a couple of those behind an USB3 hub (something I would never do -- always try to avoid USB hubs between host and disk)

  • please see my question

    Please, this here is not personal support but a general thread trying to deal with 'energy efficient ARM boards usable for OMV'.


    Why should I recommend HDDs when tons of information is available on the net? SD cards should be cloned offline (my opinion) but others claim it could be done online from within a running OS. So again: please do some research on your own and maybe use the search function in Armbian forum since there we had already discussed all (im)possible variants in depth :)

  • With an JMS561 for example: Which energy efficient ARM platform to choose?

    I've seen that post and the board but there's a limit of 6TB (see the item description "The maximum capacity compatibility with 6TB") and after some research on jmicron docs I was unable to find the reasons for such limitation. Maybe it's caused by firmware? Any chances to overcome that limit? I tried to contact the ebay seller also but no success at all.


    Moreover the socket on board seems to be ready do connect the hdd's and as I'll assemble all the electronics on a self-made 1U rack, I have the 1.75" limit on total height so I need to plan and mount all the components properly. I think that I can solve the problem using 2 cables like this:
    https://www.aliexpress.com/ite…ta-Power/32814162115.html
    Not sure about power/performance limits, I'm a noob so any advice is welcome!


    About energy efficiency I need to spin off the hdd's when not in use for some time. My actual omv install on bananapi works well on that aspect (advanced power management: 1 on physical disk settings with spindown time set as needed); not sure if all that settings works when hdd is connected to USB port through an interface as the one we're talking about... ?(

  • there's a limit of 6TB (see the item description "The maximum capacity compatibility with 6TB")

    That's BS since there is no '6 TB limit'. If the number some marketing monkey provides somewhere exceeds 2 TiB you know you're fine and can use any SATA disk up to the theoretical maximum of 128 PiB (petabyte, that's the result of SATA being designed with 48 bits to address LBAs unlike it's predecessor PATA).


    All USB3 capable USB-to-SATA bridges support LBA48 by design and as such up to 128 PiB disk sizes.

  • That's BS since there is no '6 TB limit'.


    That thing sounded strange to me too but, as I said, I'm not an expert!
    So, I'll try to implement all these advices for my new OMV based NAS using rock64 sbc with hdd's connected through the JMS561 board suggested and the cables I linked on my previous post.
    I've just ordered these items except the rock64 board 'cause I'm still not sure on what amount of ram is better to have on. I read many threads on that subject and if I understand well a larger amount of ram is needed (or preferable) when using ZFS or when using plex that I never used but I can't exclude I'll use in the future. I'll continue to search/study for a while then I'll decide what's better for me.


    Many thanks tkaiser for your advices, your hard work on the matter and your knowledge sharing :)

  • I'm still not sure on what amount of ram is better to have on

    On systems where network is faster than storage (eg. Raspberry Pi 3 B+ or more suited ARM boards with Gigabit Ethernet on an own bus but still only USB2) more DRAM always means higher 'NAS client --> server performance' since network transfers are fast as long as the amount of data written still fits inside filesystem buffers (page cache). So you have a board with Gigabit Ethernet, 4 GB DRAM but just USB2 storage and copy a 10 GB file... The first 3.x GB will be transferred at up to 100 MB/s and once OMV has to start to flush buffer contents to disk it will slow down to USB2 storage performance (slightly below 40 MB/s). With RPi 3 B+ it would be 'around 30 MB/s' vs. 'less than 20 MB/s' and the slowdown will happen already after ~750 MB or maybe even less.


    On boards where storage is not the bottleneck (Rock64 with USB3 for example or some other ARM platforms) you don't need to worry about that. 1GB will be as fast as 4GB.


    With ZFS a lot of RAM is a good idea (but you can run it also on system with less RAM but need to adjust some tunables then, mostly related again to filesystem buffers/caches). But ZFS on ARM is currently 'experts only' at least with OMV. The ZFS plugin is not available for ARM and building the necessary modules in an automated way is also challenging. So better forget about that.


    Wrt plex server... no idea, only used that once to demonstrate how easy armhf software can be installed on an arm64 distro.

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