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I think there is an awesome setup that many are overlooking! With a RockPro64 board, you can configure it to use SSD's, both SATA & NVMe! RockPro64 boards: htt

by 40four 6y ago

I think there is an awesome setup that many are overlooking! With a RockPro64 board, you can configure it to use SSD's, both SATA & NVMe! RockPro64 boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e66 https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e6... Accessories: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64-accessories/?v=0446c16e2e66 https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64-accessories/?v... I think these RockPro64 boards are highly underrated. I got one a while back, I was looking for something more powerful than a Raspberry pi. You can get it with 2 or 4 GB RAM. They have PCI-e slots, so the SSD interface cards plug into the board through them. With this setup you will get full performance from your drive, instead of having to rely on a USB connection on raspberry pi & others. SATA: https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-to-dual-sata-ii-interface-card/?v=0446c16e2e66 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-to-dual-sata-ii-i... NVMe: https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-x4-to-m-2-ngff-nvme-ssd-interface-card/?v=0446c16e2e66 https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-x4-to-m-2-ngff-nv... I've not set mine up like this yet, as I've not been doing much with my board lately except running pi-hole. But I plan on getting an NVMe interface in the future, and maybe the metal desktop casing. I think this type of setup is exactly what you're looking for. The cost is reasonable. If you get a 4GB board, a power supply, and an SATA interface you'd be all in for ~$103 before shipping. There are lots of accessories, and tons of OS options with an easy installer. I just checked, as of writing this the are builds for (both desktop & minimal) Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, CentOS, Manjaro, Armbian debian/ubuntu, DietPi. Also other stuff like Recalbox, batocera, OpenMediaVault, ChromiumOS, or Android. I not an expert in the entire SBC market, but I'm doubt many other boards have community support for that many different OSs.

kkielhofner 6y ago
The RK3399 series boards are seriously overlooked. Generally speaking you get excellent hardware support (including display graphics) with either the "vendor supported" 4.4 series kernels with Mali blobs OR 5.x mainline whatever and recent Mesa. The 5.x/Mesa stuff is about as open as you're going to get with ARM SBCs and supports hardware acceleration up to 4K. So does the 4.4 stuff with Mali blobs but that also supports hardware encoding/decoding of various video codecs. It's the most "usable" desktop I've seen yet from an ARM SBC. Anyway, because this is about a home NAS... I currently have an even cheaper RK3399-based Radxa RockPI 4B booting Armbian (Debian Buster) from a 250GB Samsung 970 EVO: kris@kkrock:~$ uname -a Linux kkrock 4.4.213-rockchip64 #19 SMP Sun Feb 14 22:42:42 CET 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux kris@kkrock:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT zram0 252:0 0 1.9G 0 disk [SWAP] zram1 252:1 0 50M 0 disk /var/log nvme0n1 259:0 0 232.9G 0 disk └─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 232.9G 0 part / kris@kkrock:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1G count=10 oflag=direct 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 13.6438 s, 787 MB/s real 0m13.794s user 0m0.000s sys 0m6.880s I suspect 5.x is probably a bit faster for I/O (maybe not) but I don't care about the Mali blobs and I like hardware video encode/decode when I need it. There are guides for your chosen board, distro, etc floating around to update the SPI flash with the correct Uboot to support booting from eMMC, NVMe, USB, whatever. Oh yeah, the Radxa RockPi4 boards also support use of Odroid-style eMMC modules, which are really fast, readily available, and plenty durable. If using PCIe for anything make sure to apply the correct boot overlay to enable PCIe 2.0 support. Depending on what you want to do between SD, eMMC, NVMe, PCIe/SSD, and USB3 there are plenty of options for storage. The boards are available from Amazon and elsewhere but for the best pricing and accessory options use "Allnet.China". It took them a few weeks to get me my aluminum case and NVMe expander but it was well worth it: https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/frontpage https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/frontpage They also have SATA hats, PoE hats, all kinds of other stuff to expand this little-known series of boards for various NAS options. Pretty much no matter what you do all in with case, power supply, storage options, etc you can't exceed $150 for valid configurations (excluding storage). My setup was around $100. For thermal management I use their "Eco Pi Pro" aluminum housing with Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste. After an extended period running "stress" to peg all CPU cores this is what armbianmonitor shows (fanless): Time big.LITTLE load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq CPU C.St. 15:37:24: 1800/1416MHz 6.25 100% 0% 99% 0% 0% 0% 57.8°C 0/5 Under 60 deg C fanless during an extended stress test? Not bad, not bad at all. EDIT: Gave up on HN formatting. You get the point.
giantg2 6y ago
Never knew about this. Thanks for sharing!

by 40four 6y ago

kkielhofner 6y ago

The RK3399 series boards are seriously overlooked. Generally speaking you get excellent hardware support (including display graphics) with either the "vendor supported" 4.4 series kernels with Mali blobs OR 5.x mainline whatever and recent Mesa. The 5.x/Mesa stuff is about as open as you're going to get with ARM SBCs and supports hardware acceleration up to 4K. So does the 4.4 stuff with Mali blobs but that also supports hardware encoding/decoding of various video codecs. It's the most "usable" desktop I've seen yet from an ARM SBC. Anyway, because this is about a home NAS... I currently have an even cheaper RK3399-based Radxa RockPI 4B booting Armbian (Debian Buster) from a 250GB Samsung 970 EVO: kris@kkrock:~$ uname -a Linux kkrock 4.4.213-rockchip64 #19 SMP Sun Feb 14 22:42:42 CET 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux kris@kkrock:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT zram0 252:0 0 1.9G 0 disk [SWAP] zram1 252:1 0 50M 0 disk /var/log nvme0n1 259:0 0 232.9G 0 disk └─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 232.9G 0 part / kris@kkrock:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1G count=10 oflag=direct 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 13.6438 s, 787 MB/s real 0m13.794s user 0m0.000s sys 0m6.880s I suspect 5.x is probably a bit faster for I/O (maybe not) but I don't care about the Mali blobs and I like hardware video encode/decode when I need it. There are guides for your chosen board, distro, etc floating around to update the SPI flash with the correct Uboot to support booting from eMMC, NVMe, USB, whatever. Oh yeah, the Radxa RockPi4 boards also support use of Odroid-style eMMC modules, which are really fast, readily available, and plenty durable. If using PCIe for anything make sure to apply the correct boot overlay to enable PCIe 2.0 support. Depending on what you want to do between SD, eMMC, NVMe, PCIe/SSD, and USB3 there are plenty of options for storage. The boards are available from Amazon and elsewhere but for the best pricing and accessory options use "Allnet.China". It took them a few weeks to get me my aluminum case and NVMe expander but it was well worth it: https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/frontpage https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/frontpage They also have SATA hats, PoE hats, all kinds of other stuff to expand this little-known series of boards for various NAS options. Pretty much no matter what you do all in with case, power supply, storage options, etc you can't exceed $150 for valid configurations (excluding storage). My setup was around $100. For thermal management I use their "Eco Pi Pro" aluminum housing with Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste. After an extended period running "stress" to peg all CPU cores this is what armbianmonitor shows (fanless): Time big.LITTLE load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq CPU C.St. 15:37:24: 1800/1416MHz 6.25 100% 0% 99% 0% 0% 0% 57.8°C 0/5 Under 60 deg C fanless during an extended stress test? Not bad, not bad at all. EDIT: Gave up on HN formatting. You get the point.

giantg2 6y ago

Never knew about this. Thanks for sharing!