Stuart Naylor

I keep pushing some questions about the Rock64 "What about port trunking with and extra usb gig eth" I am asking those questions purely out of interest as if you can plug into the right network backbone I am thinking the Rock64 makes for quite a good workgroup server. A $44.95 SoC could actually make a pretty capable server!!! That is just wild and love the idea. With someone who has played around with container/virt systems and all in one servers mainly to pool the cost of hardware investment its really interesting just to see what it could do. Home though many single disks can get near the true saturation point of Gig ethernet and the majority of homes that will be the best you get if your plugging direct into the router. WiFi theoretically with the newer AC1900 routers in a perfect environment yeah the speeds could go up and fastest in that perfect environment I have seen a test on is the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1900 (WRT1900AC) which manages 80MBps file transfers. Also its £190 on Amazon which sort of knackers how impressed I am with the $44.95 price point of the Rock64. So I really do get the argument for a single disk SoC arrangement in the home, the bottleneck is the Ethernet and its highly likely connects will be much less than 1gig. In home usage patterns writing is much less then reading and with diversification (not all at the same time) that single disk arrangement is more enough for most of us. I would like the Armbian guys to explore pushing the boundaries a bit more as the info they publish is absolute gold and top quality. Like you can get a 12v to 5v convertor with a much higher quality 12v PSU, you can industrial grade screw lock cables and industrial hubs if you where daft enough to pay that price. Type C is great and with the next generation employing them, the RK3399 already is. Hugely complex mining rigs and clusters are already running off what some would say are extremely crappy USB & PSU combinations but its a matter of choice. USB C has already surfaced and if you have to have a punt Sata could be a dead duck especially in the home. NAS in its current centralized form could be a dead duck, NAS might just become NAB (Backup) You guys should be testing and stressing Armbian & these SoCs to extract maximum performance and continuing to push the boundaries and future of Armbian. Crappy cheap hardware is a matter of choice and if people employ it, it is there problem and not yours. Even for testing you might use a cheap bit of kit with a disclaimer "Hey I used this, just to test, but for production or prolonged use I strongly suggest..." I think that is the most important thing you have said as thingy is highly likely what it will be. Decentralized spanning as its cost level brings up such a huge array of possibilities. Each device could well have a single disk to create a Mesh Storage & Network area thingie, as that is my best punt also, as there are so many possibilities. Armbian & the Rock64 is capable of pushing about a max of 1.7 gig and surely connectors & PSU's isn't part of the focus of interest? Some SoHo and most small businesses do have wired networks that maybe could really take advantage of this price point if they wanted to.

@willmore Can you supply the same for the Odroid64 & orangepipc2? openssl speed -elapsed -evp aes-128-cbc aes-192-cbc aes-256-cbc Must be the Neon AES & SHA support and boy is the AES optimization off the chart for the Rock64 with the OrangePiPC2 not being bad either.

@willmore http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/d/d7/Rockchip_RK3328_Datasheet_V1.1-20170309.pdf Quad-core Cortex-A53 is integrated with separate Neon and FPU coprocessor, also with shared L2 Cache. The Quad-core GPU supports high-resolution display and game. Lots of high-performance interface to get very flexible solution, such as multi-channel display including HDMI2.0a and TV Encoder (CVBS). TrustZone and crypto hardware are integrated for security. 32bits DDR3/DDR3L/DDR4/LPDDR3 provides high memory bandwidth. Cipher engine  Support AES 128/192/256  Supports the DES (ECB and CBC modes) and TDES (EDE and DED) algorithms  Supports MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 HASH algorithms  Support PKA(RSA) 512/1024/2048 bit Exp Modulator  Support 160-bit Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG)  Support 256-bit True Random Number Generator (TRNG) Apart from that dunno and not sure how supported or that anyone has done any benchmarks yet. So yeah the NEON extensions. Maybe @zador.blood.stained will supply some.

AES encryption could be of interest but isn't the performance due to the embedded cipher engine or is there a way to use it with something like Snapraid? You might have link aggregated Rock64s in a Snapraid cluster or decentralized node array

@tkaiser Yeah I know what port trunking is and to be honest was just wondering if anyone had done any ioperf tests/helios. I was just wondering about the Rock64 being a server that can supply multiple clients. The NAS/Router posts later also its more curiosity what can be achieved with that USB3.0 on a SoC when much of its bandwidth is bottlenecked by the ethernet. ~1700 Mbits/sec combined is that pulling from an SSD on the same USB? Anyone with and io and cpu stats? If this is wise or not is very much a matter of choice and purpose. With @Kosmatik's experiences of the JMS561 I posted the fix to Smartmon to stop it sending the wrong call to the controller. Its at the end of that thread. https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/552 Again curiosity but I find it hard to differentiate a RAID1 JMS561 for $20 running two disks than say the 10$ single USB adaptor that many are doing perf tests with. Also it is completely dependent on the disks you choose being SSD, HDD or even hybrid. http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/seagate-laptop-fam/barracuda_25/en-us/docs/100807728d.pdf Irrespective of cables, psu's which you could argue the only difference is what is hidden in a enclosure and do we have PSU's & Cables when its USB3.0 & 3.1? Has anyone tested a cheap $20 JMS561 after fixing the smartmon bug? I posted a $20 adapter but guess you guys might have a 2bay with the same chipset and just wondered how the SoC would cope and what is achievable. If you ever have the time I would be really interested, if anyone fancies giving it go as they already have the equipment, I think it would be of interest to many. The JMS561 was just an example of a single chipset, there are others and also others that do 4 bay and above. They maybe cheap & nasty, but they are getting really cheap and that might make them more fit for purpose. We could have newer forms of mediastore that are more suited to how we use data especially media. OverlayFS could have an SSD Upper with a HDD Lower mounted over NFS with a cheap SoC supplying numerous users. Where you archive down to the lower. Could even have a decentralized volume spread over network nodes or a cluster, where capacity is just add another node. USB3.0 could well be a precursor to the next rake of 3.1 systems with C connectors... There might be objections but I think its interesting and also useful to know what these SoCs are capable of without any assumptions of a singular method or employ. https://wdullaer.com/blog/2016/03/19/create-a-nas-with-redundancy-using-snapraid/ I keep thinking the Rock64 could make a great Kodi box that shares a USB attached mirror via NFS. No link aggregation no Snapraid just a cheap hardware mirror. For home a few boxes can pool those shares via aufs making a very simple node and collective system that scales by just adding another. You gain bandwidth by diversification as you are not always sharing from a central store. There are all sorts of ways you could use bandwidth when it starts to become available at this cost, maybe it would be informative to give it a try.

Hasn't smartmon fixed the wrong call? https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/552

I only have a 100Mb USB ethernet but just wondered has anyone tried port trunking a USB3.0 1Gb with the on-board just to have a glance at the workload & throughput? Aint got the board yet, but apols interested. Also wondered what your thoughts on the Jmicron JMS561 2 port USB RAID controller? Not much more than a normal usb to sata adaptor https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Dual-SATA-USB3-0-hdd-Adapter_60670388309.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.9.3c93b095xybUP4 Funny though to put the connectors like that rather than oppisite ends on top and bottom of the case so it goes between 2 drives or sits on a single... 8gb mirror 16gb stripe and I am guessing its a JMS561 but prob is and not as jbod so it just looks like a single drive? PS a tv box has turned up with gig ethernet like the Rock http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/07/14/bqeel-mvr9-tv-box-review-part-1-specifications-unboxing-and-teardown/ DDR4 as well but only 2Gb

I am not much of a developer as my skills are more rust. As an end user the two products that are of most interest to me are the Rock64 & Helios4. Rock64 with the 4GB is sort of an allrounder with the Mali & USB 3.0 with the possibility of just hooking it up to OEM 4bay USB Jbod/Raid box, NAS with maybe KODI on top. Helios4 really interested in that NAS specific design, but got a feeling the Rock64 will garner more interest as a building block rather than a specific solution. I just purchased a Rock64 and hopefully can glean some wisdom from you guys. [Edit] http://espressobin.net/ looks pretty interesting and again opens up router / nas solutions. Still think the Rock64 offers a bit less but may be more general purpose that sort of fits its budget.