allen--smithee

The problem of this post is solved !!
Your fans with an efficient thermal pad and SSD drives are 18w and 10db peak.
I very rarely exceed 12w in a day and the unit is completely inaudible.
Except for doing these tests which do not reflect the reality of normal use at all.

@ gprovost
As we might expect, there is a little spread of the pads on the outer edges of the processor, but also on the edge of the radiator
and so you were right, there is no need to leave the inductors bareheaded.
Now I think 19x19 is enough for the dimensions of the cpu thermical pad with a 1.5mm. 
I redid the separation between the CPU Pad and the rest of the board and put pieces of pad in the slots of the inductors. 
You don't know if it will be possible so, nevertheless now we know what we need for our next blends at home ;).
 
P6 and P7> PWM = 35
P6 & P7> PWM = 50 is my new PWMMAX on Fancontrol
P6 et P7> PWM = 255
 
 
@SIGSEGV
If you are interested in this solution.
I recommend TP-VP04-C 1.5mm for your helios64 (2 plates of 90x50x1.5mm)
 
 

@ gprovost
As we might expect, there is a little spread of the pads on the outer edges of the processor, but also on the edge of the radiator
and so you were right, there is no need to leave the inductors bareheaded.
Now I think 19x19 is enough for the dimensions of the cpu thermical pad with a 1.5mm. 
I redid the separation between the CPU Pad and the rest of the board and put pieces of pad in the slots of the inductors. 
You don't know if it will be possible so, nevertheless now we know what we need for our next blends at home ;).
 
P6 and P7> PWM = 35
P6 & P7> PWM = 50 is my new PWMMAX on Fancontrol
P6 et P7> PWM = 255
 
 
@SIGSEGV
If you are interested in this solution.
I recommend TP-VP04-C 1.5mm for your helios64 (2 plates of 90x50x1.5mm)
 
 

@gprovost
my Cpu + 2disks fan will always have a PWMMIN=35
my intention is to decrease PWMMAX and to delay the intervention of active ventilation.
 
Before, solicited the cpu made the fans roar, this is no longer the case today.
I can perform tasks with the first 5 minutes of a 100% CPU and the unit remains silent and afterwards I don't need a big air flow to stay cold.
 
cat / dev / thermal-board / temp1_input indicates:
 10 ° less than the CPU during stress.
 1 ° less than the CPU at rest.
I have to perform a long test to confirm but I think I can maintain Tcpu100% < 70° (Tboard < 60°) with only PWMMAX = 50 on fan-p6. 
 
There are certainly some points to improve concerning the thickness, in my unit, I used a thickness of 1.5 mm for the whole surface.
I realized that the inductors were high points on the PCB.
My intention was to remove the thermal pad on top so that it would be in direct contact with the radiator.
It would be relevant to try with 2mm in order to also cover the inductors from the top. 
 
It is planned to dismantle it in a week to see the contact points and check the height in the gel.
unfortunately the gel has already sagged, I can't modify the height of the radiator with the elements unless I do a modeling pad workshop,
but I can crush a very thin layer of pad at the top of inductor to avoid an air cushion. 
If necessary I have a second Gelid Pad 90x50x1.5 but I would like to keep it for the next one 
 
the 3W solution does the job, it's not the most efficient (not to say an insulator) but it's an economical solution,
and intended for most people who use traditional Hard Disk Drives that require active ventilation to improve the life span.
My use is particular, after all my unit screws into a living room and uses SDD that heats up little.
But it's a point to be improved indeed and if you charge an extra 10$ for a 6W pad you can be sure that I'll take it off to put a better and I'll tell you that your solution was crap.

@allen--smithee Actually what you are doing is not ideal since now the inductors (little squary components that appears through your thermal pad) are not able anymore to dissipate heat via the heatsink. These inductors generate quite a lot of heat and it will spread to LPDDR4 and PMIC trough PCB. The purpose of the Helios64 heatsink is obviously not to just dissipate heat for the SoC but for all other key components (LPDDR4, SATA controller, USB-to-LAN, etc...).
 
Here your measurement is only from the SoC point of view, which is not necessary the best way at looking at overall thermal management. Could you add back some thermal pad on the inductors and re-run your thermal measurement. It would be interesting to see if you see the same thing afterwards.
 
In any case we will change thermal pad supplier, we are not really happy by the current one.
 

After one hour of disassembly, cleaning, cutting, installation and reassembly.
My helios64 has gelid thermal pad GP-Ultimate solutions whose manufacturer boasts a small 15W.mK.
 
I think I just solved my ventilation problem for this generation and the following ones.
I will do the tests within a week but for the moment Helios64 remains very cold even under full load.

Around 3W/m-K. Dimension and thickness below , the small 21x21x1mm square is the one above the RK3399 SoC :
 

 
 
Let's clarify, you can use Helios64 board in passive cooling mode on its own, but if the board is installed in the provided enclosure along HDDs device then you definitely need active cooling.

hi @bunducafe
in order of price, time and efficiency. 
a) you can play with the parameters of fancontrol to find a passive / active fan compromise, and limit the rotational speed and therefore the noise of the fans. (/etc/fancontrol). 
b) you can also lower the frequency of the processor to reduce its TDP, (armbian-config)
c) i do not know the specifications of the thermal bridge (W.mK and thickness) between the CPU and the radiator, maybe this can be replaced to improve thermal conductivity between them. (<10euro)
d) New Fans (>30euros)
 
 

Hi folks,
 
I am fairly new here, reading, trying to understand but do have some knowledge with Unix and some SBC. Now the Helios64 is on arrival and I would like to know if I should change the fans immediately in order to get a quieter case. 
 
Is the NF-A8-PWM significantly less noisy than the stock ones? Or is there maybe a different route to go?! 

Yes, either a smaller SSDs focused version - or a solution to fit more SSD or 2.5 drives with a SATA port multiplier on the same space as the 5 drives, to increase storage density.
If later revisions of the main CPU board or newer boards can be retro fit into these cases, it would make for a smooth and straight upgrade path.

A 2.5" variation for either a SSD based NAS; or a low power NAS with 2.5" HDD's. Of course the current design could be used for 2.5" drives, but a more compact design would be nice.

I am very interested in purchasing a version half case size for 5 SSD/2.5" with the same raw design  
 
 
 

The interior is 10.5cm wide and 16cm high and 15.5 deep and a commercial ssd disk has a dimension of 10cm x 7cm x 0.6cm with case.
Create a new backplane with 4 x Jmb575 5 Sata ports spaced 1cm each you can plug 20 SDD (up to 80 TB = 20x 4TB) on the Helios64 and put your cache on M.2 Port Sata1 ,
and waiting for new SoC 4-8 line PCIe v.3 (RK3399 have 4 line v2.1) .
 
 

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/lvmcache.7.html
https://linuxhint.com/configuring-zfs-cache/
Here you go... use 4 HDDs and an SSD cache.
Or sell your unit, quite a lot of people wanted to buy one and couldn't in time.
OR, Frankenstein your unit and add in port multipliers to original SATA ports. Can add up to 20 HDDs to the 4 original SATA ports, and up to 5 SSDs to the remaining 1 original SATA port. The hardware controller specs say that it supports port multipliers, not sure about Armbian kernel, might have to modify.
 
Btw, you can take a look at the new version of Odroid H2+ with port multipliers (up to 10 SATA disks, + PCI-e Nvme) if you are into more tinkering. Also you get two 2.5G network ports instead of one. Hardkernel team has a blog post about its setup and benchmarks. https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h2/application_note/10_sata_drives
I am planning to expand my network infra with the H2+ soon. You can even plug a $45 4 port 2.5g switch into the Nvme slot now. I'm going crazy about this unit. If only it didn't have a shintel (r/AyyMD) cpu in.
 
Anyhow-
Just doing a bit of research shows that this was not a 'decision' made by Kobol, not exactly. There are just two reliable PCI-e to SATA controllers I could find that support multiple SATA ports(+4), with the limitation of RK3399 which has 4 PCI-e lanes. It would be a different story if RK had 8 lanes, but that is another can of worms that includes cpu arch, form factor, etc. Not gonna open that can while I'm barely qualified to open this one.
 
What we have here in Helios64 is JMB585, and then the other option was Marvel 88SE9215. Marvel only supports 4 ports, while JMB supports 5. There are no controllers that work reliably with 4 PCI-e 2.1 lanes and have more than 5 ports that I could find.
There is the quite new Asmedia ASM1166 which actually supports 6 ports, but that was probably not available during design of Helios64 as it is quite new. Not only that, there is a weird thread about its log output on Unraid forums.
 
At the end, this '5 ports only' was not exactly a decision for Kobol. But a rather uninformed decision made by you. You don't see people here complaining about this. You are the second one who even mentioned it, and the only one who is complaining so far with CAPS no less. Which means that the specs were clear to pretty much everyone that this was the case.
 
My suggestion is to replace one of the drives with a Samsung 860 pro, make it a SLOG/L2ARC, or in my case a LVM cache (write back mode, make sure you have a proper UPS, or the battery in the unit is connected properly) and call it a day. SATA port is faster than the 2.5G ethernet or the USB DAS mode anyhow so your cache SSD will mostly perform ok.

Bonjour @sdelhaye ! J'habite aussi en France et je serais intéressé par ton helios64. J'ai créé un compte juste pour te répondre donc je suis encore en période de "validation" sur le forum et par conséquent je ne peux envoyer qu'un seul message par jour. Peux tu m'envoyer ton adresse mail en MP pour qu'on puisse discuter plus simplement ?
 
Orfeas

@allen--smithee
if you need to modify the bootloader, you can start from these lines
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/u-boot/u-boot-rockchip64-mainline/add-board-helios64.patch#L1671-L1687
You can add parameter checking there. Maybe check certain U-Boot environment variable, maybe check for certain file in the filesystem.
You could also remove it completely and modify /boot/boot.scr instead, to enable/disable the HDD power.
 
Another thing to explore, you could remove the afromentioned u-boot function and also remove the power rail nodes from linux device tree
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/kernel/rockchip64-current/add-board-helios64.patch#L239-L259
and then when you need to enable it, just access the gpio from sysfs.
 

@ShadowDance
Finally, I installed the original fans which were already very good,
but this time I pushed further by adding a MAXPWM line limiting the maximum rotation of the fans.
This changed my life

I feel terribly stupid !!

 
# Helios64 PWM Fan Control Configuration # /etc/fancontrol # /usr/sbin/fancontrol # /var/run/fancontrol.pid # Command # ls -l /sys/class/hwmon | grep fan # cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/pwm1 && cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon5/pwm1 # systemctl stop fancontrol.service # systemctl start fancontrol.service # echo 255 > /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/pwm1 && echo 255 > /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon5/pwm1 # hdparm -H /dev/sdd | grep celsius # hddtemp /dev/sd[a-e] INTERVAL=10 # Temp source : /dev/thermal-cpu FCTEMPS=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=/dev/thermal-cpu/temp1_input /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=/dev/thermal-cpu/temp1_input # temp1_critique = 85° < big downclock 1.8Ghz > 1.62Ghz # P6 => Fan down (2HDD+CPU) | P7 => Fan Up (3HDD) #Temp Limit PWM increase MINTEMP=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=55 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=65 #Temp Limit PWM = MAXPWM MAXTEMP=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=85 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=85 #Fan Type "C" 350-3600 PWM = 25 = 350 RPM| PWM = 255 = 3600RPM #Fan Start PWM = 25 MINSTART=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=30 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=30 #Fan Stop PWM = 15 MINSTOP=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=35 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=35 #PWM Minimal < MINSTOP (SSD P7 = 0 / HDD P7 = 35) MINPWM=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=35 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=0 #PWM Maximal (78°< Tcpu100% <85°) #T = 20° PWM = 120 | T = 25° PWM = ?? | T = 30° PWM = ?? MAXPWM=/dev/fan-p6/pwm1=120 /dev/fan-p7/pwm1=65