Hello everyone,
A couple months ago, I bought an ODROID-HC1 to leverage a spare 1TB drive. Running OMV, it has served its purpose well to this point.
The issue is, as devices get inevitably replaced, I find myself with more and more new old disks sitting there. And I cannot make use of them at the moment because of the lack of more SATA ports on the HC1.
So, I'm trying to figure out what new board is best suited for my use case:
The board is mainly used for torrenting and media storage, i.e. big files that don't change.
No plan for a Plex Server or a build farm. So no need for a workhorse of a processor.
The data is backed up to the cloud and not of crucial importance, so losing a disk is not a big issue. I therefore plan to use a mix of used and new disks as my needs expand.
My Internet connection is about 300 Mb/s both ways at the moment. Backing up data to the cloud and redownloading it from there on my laptop is, most of the time, even more convenient than local transfer for me. So the Internet connection really is the bottleneck in terms of speed.
As for the hardware requirements, here is what I think I need:
- Low power consumption
- Gigabit Ethernet
- As many SATA ports as possible
And of course as cheap as possible.
Having looked at quite a few posts and vendor sites already, I have identified 4 interesting contenders:
- Kobol Helios4, with 4 SATA ports, ECC RAM and a neat looking enclosure.
- Marvell Espressobin, 1 SATA port + one Marvell 88SE9215-based mPCIe expansion cards for 4 SATA ports, 5 SATA ports total.
- GnuBee PC2, with 6 SATA ports, but I've read posts about poor performance, I would appreciate further explanation on this.
- SolidRun ClearFog Pro, + 2x Marvell 88SE9215-based mPCIe expansion cards for 4 SATA ports ; and one Marvell 88SE9235-based M.2 card for another 4 SATA ports, for a whopping total of 12 SATA ports. Another plus of this one is that I get a 5 ports GigE switch (I see 6 on the pictures but whatever) in the bargain.
I am currently waiting for updates from Kobol on the availability of the Helios4 ; but I may already need more than 4 SATA ports in the coming months, so I'm more leaning towards the other 3 options, the last one in particular.
Anyway, the purpose of this post was to have your advice and comments on my project. I'm still a newcomer to the SBC world and any feedback is appreciated.
