Which energy efficient ARM platform to choose?

Quote from lemonntrii

Are there somewhere some bandwidth benchmarks already done ? I'm interested to know how those little boards can work with Gigabits LAN + USB HDD attached to them.

Maybe this

Post

OMV5: read/write performance for SMB shares hosted on RPi4

Last update: 4Feb2022
To allow for a comparison of "apples to apples" and answer questions like "read or write rate is only #MB/sec on my hardware".

Short summary:

• A RPi4 using below SMB 'Extra Options' will max out a 1Gbit/s wired network (common maximum speed in home and office networks)
• SMB 'Extra Options' are platform independent
• performance bottleneck for clients accessing data on the NAS is the network hardware
  • best case for wireless network access via WiFi-4/801.11n is for Write ~ 10 MByte/s

…

mi-hol

Dec 30th 2020

Quote from lemonntrii

I'm interested to know how those little boards can work with Gigabits LAN + USB HDD attached to them.

Setting aside that Linux and most of the packages that support it are really efficient, most of the processes that abuse a CPU and require gobs of RAM are associated with desktops and workstation graphics. (The term "bloatware" comes to mind.) That's the beautiful thing about accessing a server remotely, using a web browser.

With a console that's accessed with a web browser, nearly all of the graphics task is transferred to a desktop workstation. On the other side of the coin, the processing power required by a home server, for serving files and the web page console, is minimal.

Quote from indragm

what's a good alternative for a 2 drive NAS?

In my opinion, -> the Odriod HC4 is a complete solution for a 2 drive NAS. It comes mounted inside of it's own 2 drive dock. Beyond -> the recommended 4amp PS and an SD-card, there's nothing else to buy.

The HC4 is supported by -> Armbian. You'd need to bypass petitboot (explained on the Armbian HC4 page) and download the Armbian Bullseye CLI version.

Here's the -> Armbian Bullseye install for OMV.

Quote from Pakcjo

What do you think of the Radxa Rock 5B? I'm searching for a 4 bay system as power efficient as possible. That board has an M.2 slot which is supposed to be 4 lanes pcie 3.0.

First note that Debian Bookworm is the base OS package for installing Openmediavault.

I looked at Armbian's download site and didn't find an image for the Radxa Rock 5B. There were fairly recent -> posts on their forum that suggest there may be a 5B development image somewhere, but I didn't find anything available for downloading on Armbian's main page or in their archive.

I looked at the -> Radxa Wiki for a Debian Bookworm install and noted that their downloads include "KDE". Desktop editions of Debian Bookworm are a "No-Go". I suppose it might be possible to install the Debian Bookworm & KDE image, then remove the KDE desktop on the command line before installing OMV but that hasn't been tested (that I know of).

((There is the possibility of building Debian for ->arm64 but that's not for beginners or, arguably, intermediate Linux users. The entire purpose for the Armbian project is to tweak Debian Arm builds to work well with various Arm boards. There's considerable development work involved.))

Lastly, the m2 to SATA adaptor is yet another X factor. It may be necessary, for the SATA adapter to work, to have support written into the OS (Honestly, IDK).

In the bottom line, there are other more conventional paths to a low power NAS that don't have as many risks.