esbeeb

Thanks!!

Thanks so much. Knowing those boards have NAS-related HATs makes a huge impact on my decision-making. When viewing the pages for the NanoPi NEO2 or Orange Pi Zero Plus , there was no obvious way of knowing that they had custom NAS HATs made by the vendors. Not to complain, but these decision-swaying NAS HATs were not listed as some kind of tag (you know, in the blue boxes under "Specifications", saying something like "NAS-HAT"), nor were these HATs listed in the "Tested 3rd Party Hardware" section. The fact that these HATs take care of the powering and cabling of the attached drives matters a lot to me as well. I could mess around with soldering irons, hobby glue guns, etc, but I'd far rather not. I wish these SBC Vendors wouldn't be so excruciatingly cheap about shaving a few dollars off the pricetag (with such cost-cutting measures, but then making a hassle like this for the end user to solve on their own). There's a big difference between "Cheap and Cheery", and "Cheap and Grumpy", IMHO. For example, I'm feeling disappointed that the Espressobin and the Helios4 leaves it up to the end user to make/buy their own molex-to-SATA power cable (are these cables even for sale anywhere?). Just a possible Wish item... please mention these NAS HATs somehow on those Armbian pages: for the NanoPi NEO2 or Orange Pi Zero. PS: You Armbian guys are awesome, please keep up the good work. PPS: You're going to hate this, @tkaiser, but I file the Raspberry Pi under "Cheap and Cheery". I'm also trying to find out which NAS-friendly boards I'd also file under "Cheap and Cheery" here. So far, for example, I'm really liking the NanoPi NEO2 and Orange Pi Zero (plus NAS HATs), because the H5 SoC's are well-supported in the mainline kernel, and are currently Armbian-"Supported".

OK, this is super juicy and helpful. Having followed this advice, what then are we left to choose from, for boards (if any), which are Armbian-"Supported"? That is to say, which "Supported" Armbian boards have true SATA (not behind USB), and have Gigabit Ethernet? Umm, I see the Helios4 board is marked "Supported", but they are only taking "pre-orders" to buy one of these, and it looks like you might need to live in Europe to get one, not sure if they ship to North America or Asia. I also see the Espressobin is currently "Supported", but I've heard about stability issues on that board. Does anyone know if the SATA on the Espressobin is "behind" USB? (I'm guessing no.) To me, those are the only boards I'd want to consider for a NAS. @hjc suggests the NanoPC T4, but that's not yet a "Supported" board. Also, the NanoPi M4 which you linked to, also is not yet a "Supported" board, @tkaiser @hjc

A vote of confidence from a reputable poster like you means a lot to me. I too feel a bit leery about sharing out files over a USB-attached drive, however since many of these SBC's don't have true SATA controllers like a PC would (but merely put the SATA behind USB), then you often sort of can't escape sharing out files over a (very-large-capacity) USB-attached drive, wouldn't you agree?

Use case: simple NAS Boards to consider: anything with at least UASP, better yet, USB 3.0 or SATA. But stability (under heavy disk I/O and load average) matters over speed! Also, Gigabit Ethernet is a must. For all the SBC's which are listed as Supported, to what degree can I trust that I won't get kernel freezes, or filesystem errors, when disk I/O gets thick and furious? I completely understand if the disk I/O slows down to a crawl, as the load average gets high, but I'm wanting to feel assured that a board marked as Supported won't "flake out" on me, potentially destroying all my files, should I decide to use it for a simple NAS. Here is how I would personally try to torture-test a board, for example: - Be watching kernel messages. - Also be watching htop, to see the load average. - Share out a folder (on an externally attached UASP USB hard drive adapter, like the one @tkaiser always uses, which has an SSD drive connected) over SAMBA, having been formatted with an EXT4 filesystem. Then from a remote machine, copy a huge number (say, 20 GB worth) of tiny files (like a large ebook collection from Calibre, ie. the "Calibre Library" folder) into the NAS into that SAMBA share. - Have the root filesystem on an eMMC on the NAS (or good SD card with fast random I/O). Then run a command like "sudo updatedb" to create lots of disk IO on the root filesystem. - Just to be bad, have a USB stick with a VFAT filesystem on it, and some files which aren't important. Connect that stick also, then while doing some file operations on it, just rip the stick out, to create some USB-related kernel errors (knowing fully well it will corrupt that VFAT filesystem). Does this affect the SAMBA share over on the other USB-attached drive? How would you do a torture test of storage I/O? Can anyone recommend a "Supported" Armbian board (as above, ie. having at least UASP, better yet, USB 3.0 or SATA) with a recent kernel, which would stand up to such a torture test, without freezing up/flaking out/destroying the filesystems on the root or external EXT4 drive? I would want this sort of assurance before trusting any "Supported" board for being suitable for a simple NAS, having rock solid stability for disk I/O.

That's so cool. I didn't know that.

Yikes, indeed they censored me. I thought I was being polite. Well, the one thing I really, really love about the Raspbery Pi, despite the admittedly technical outdatedness, is that they stand behind their product, such as it is, much more long-term than all the other SBC makers seem to. They also hired Simon Long to work full time for several years running on polishing up the lightweight desktop of their choosing. I really appreciate all his UX work, which virtually no other SBC makers seem to have the resources and/or desire to invest in: that 10% of polish on their end-user experience that makes a very big difference to all the average, less-technical, non-linux geeks of the world. Every sharp edge they smooth out prevents the scaring away of new users who probably have very short attention spans, what with the smartphones that they're much more accustomed to being so dumbed-down for the masses. Having said this, I think Armbian has also come a long way in smoothing out rough edges as well. So based on the longer-term support, and praiseworthy UX people like Simon Long, I cut Raspberry Pi a lot of slack. They're spreading Linux to a new generation far more effectively than most Linux-related projects out there! All that PR they work hard at, is worth something positive in my books, in the grander scheme of things. I fully agree that the use-case of anything storage-intensive, as not being suitable on the Pi. But they deserve a honored place at the table of embedded computing, for what they've managed to accomplish so far, in the particular use-cases where they are much more suited. So please cut them a little slack, @tkaiser.

OK, so if I catch your drift (and please correct me if I'm wrong), then any Armbian-supported SBC which has the OS on an eMMC would give much better desktop performance, than, say, the OS being on a run-of-the-mill SD card, since presumably the eMMCs (such as the eMMC's which this board supports) would have nice, high fast random IO (IOPS) and low latency (even though the MB/s of the eMMCs might seem a little lack-lustre, at say, 40ish MB/s). In other words, if you want to run a desktop on this board, then definitely use the eMMC for the OS (as the obvious way to get the easiest-to-set-up, best desktop performance). Unless of course, the MicroSD card is one of the latest ones with the "A1" branding, or the really good Samsung EVO card on Amazon, mentioned in the Armbian Documentation.

This whole UASP thing is new to me. Thanks for helping me understand. Getting an accurate sense of how many MB/sec one can realistically expect has a huge impact on deciding on an SBC, IMHO. This factors in huge to how fast a NAS will perform, and for desktop performance as well. PS: I asked the Raspberry Pi foundation to add UASP to their next SBC, on their forum. If anyone would like to chime in with me, here it is: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=125840&p=1362880#p1362880

Thanks for the review! Extremely helpful to inform wether to buy or not. I never expected to see 40MB/sec file transfers over USB2. Without reading this review of yours, I would have never even considered this board, thinking "Not even USB3, let alone SATA? No way. The disk I/O would suck too badly."