Home server - Cubieboard2 replacement

[znoxx]

Hi all!

 

I'm happily using Armbian on Cubieboard2 working as home server (samba, 4(!) LXC containers with Deluge, tor, owncloud and some other small apps) + VPN client.

Pretty happy with it, especially for internal SATA.

 

Recently found that Cubietech releases Cubieboard6 on S-500 CPU with same form-factor and SATA. That means, that all casing/housing can stay intact. LXC containers also can be migrated since CPU is still ARMv7.

But at the same time found somewhere on this forum, that board is not really good quality... Cannot argue or agree with this since I don't have a board and it looks costly.

 

So my question - what is advised for home server like my one described above ?

Main requirements are: 2Gb RAM, Armbian full support, not-too-power-hungry. Still not sure about SATA -- it's really handy, but USB drive with UAS support speeds are comparable I guess ?

Also thought about Odroid HC-1, but is it worth it's price ? 

 

What is on your mind ?

[JMCC]

34 minutes ago, znoxx said:

Also thought about Odroid HC-1, but is it worth it's price ? 

Totally worth the $50 it costs. As a matter of fact, that would be my first recommendation for your use case.

[znoxx]

1 minute ago, JMCC said:

Totally worth the $50 it costs. As a matter of fact, that would be my first recommendation for your use case.

One point still here - about "not too power hungry".

What about consumption ? It requires quite solid PSU as far as I see. Does it really consumes 3 amperes ?

[JMCC]

Just now, znoxx said:

It requires quite solid PSU as far as I see. Does it really consumes 3 amperes ?

If you want to power a external drive relaibly, I would not use any power source that provides less than 3 amps, not only with HC1 but with any board.

 

About power consumption, it will be higher compared to less powerful boards as the Cubie2, but it will stay under 1 amp most of the time, except when you run very demanding tasks.

[znoxx]

Thanks a lot for clarification.

Looks like shipping it from reseller in USA will be much cheaper than from official Korean store.

Will think about it one more time =)

 

Waiting for more opinions

[jeanrhum]

If you want a cheaper solution, maybe a supported board based on rk3328 like rock64 could be a good option since it has usb3 and gigabit ethernet.

[chwe]

9 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

If you want a cheaper solution, maybe a supported board based on rk3328 like rock64

well is it really cheaper? Assuming the 2gb ram is really a requirement:

Board: 35$

Reliable USB-Sata bridge: 10$

 

you save roughly 5$.. Depending on other requirements, the HC1/HC2 has a lot more horse power and a proper casing solution which is still missing if you opt for the rock64.. If encryption is important maybe a ARMv8 might be a better choice. But then I would probably opt for a RK3399 (support not 100% mature yet) but decent mainline support and more options to bring up SATA than with a RK3328 (and the price for the cheaper RK3399 are quite okay)..

[jeanrhum]

7 minutes ago, chwe said:

you save roughly 5$

You're right, but znoxx may already have an USB-sata bridge since he mentioned this option.

If price is not so important, rk3399 is clearly a better choice with other possibilities.

[znoxx]

First of all, thanks for sharing your opinions.

My shortlist is:

1) Odroid HC-1 - due to known stability

2) Rock64 - it has USB3 on board and recently I purchased USB3 dock for 2 drives. Works nice, uas supported, but no trim. So idea was to connect 2 drives -ssd for system and rotational for data, but looks like trim support is not for me. That's not good, but, well. Nothing stops me for rotational drive for system. Or leave system on _good_ _expensive_ microSD, or make the "read only root", which is promising, but I guess kernel updates will suffer while changing "/boot" data.

3) Orange Pi Prime. Good for it's price, has wifi onboard (hope it supports host mode for hostapd in latest kernel), but no USB 3.0.

 

(2) and (3) are 64bit I guess. Not sure I do have 64 bit tasks (e.g. Apache/nginx large file upload), but still good to have. Also I'm quite sure they both consume less power then  HC1. The case is not electricity bill, but requirements for PSU. I run my "rig" from 10A 5V psu, which powers cubie, usb hub, couple of orange pi's (pc2 and pc) without any issues. Probably HC-1 will be ok with this setup also.

Personally I really like coming Allwinner H6 boards. They are colder on same Mhz's, but Armbian is in testing stage for them and quite far from stable version.