PCDuino 3 Nano armbian alternative

[TornadoZX]

Hi guys, I have PCDuino 3 Nano which worked fine on latest ARMBIAN on Debian Jessie which is moving to EOL and armbian support for this board was dropped due to lack of devices. I have used it mainly as OMV sever with sata drive but now I migrate to a x86 install and this board will be wiped as I would like to use at as vpn server etc. What are my alternatives? I know that still are a lot of A20 boards that have armbian support. Which of them I can use and what probably won't work?

[NicoD]

Hi.
You can keep using Armbian on it even when it's EOL. It just isn't updated anymore, and it loses support for it.
I do not think you'll find a better supported OS for it.
Either you will have to do with an unsupported OS. Or you could upgrade to a newer board.
Greetings.

[TornadoZX]

20 minutes ago, NicoD said:

Hi.
You can keep using Armbian on it even when it's EOL. It just isn't updated anymore, and it loses support for it.
I do not think you'll find a better supported OS for it.
Either you will have to do with an unsupported OS. Or you could upgrade to a newer board.
Greetings.

I think you got me wrong, there are boards like cubietruck etc that have A20 CPU. I would like to know which is best compatible.

[NicoD]

4 minutes ago, TornadoZX said:

I think you got me wrong, there are boards like cubietruck etc that have A20 CPU. I would like to know which is best compatible.

Oh, I'm sorry.
Is there any reason why you would want another A20 board? It's an old SoC. Support for it is going to dwindle.

If you'd like to stay with Allwinner then an H3/H5/H6 board would have a lot longer lifetime/support.
I believe you want SATA. I don't know that many boards with sata on-board. The Orange Pi +2 has an H3 and SATA and is supported.
You could also go for an SBC with USB3 and connect your drivers over USB3-SATA. Then an H6 might be good. I like the Pine H64 model B the most. But it's still in development fase.
The RK3399's are more expensive, but bring a lot more connectivity. The NanoPi M4 for example has PCIe over GPIO's what can fit a 4 x SATA hat. It's hot 2 USB3 controllers for each 2 ports.

All I can find that's supported in Armbian with the A20 + SATA is the Olimex Lime 2 and the Cubietruck. I do not know those boards or board makers. Maybe someone else knows more about A20 boards.

[TornadoZX]

2 hours ago, NicoD said:

All I can find that's supported in Armbian with the A20 + SATA is the Olimex Lime 2 and the Cubietruck. I do not know those boards or board makers. Maybe someone else knows more about A20 boards. 

Thanks, that's basically what I'm trying to achieve. I've downloaded the pre-made OMV 4 cubietruck image. It boot, usb and hdmi works. Will try others.

 

Quote

The RK3399's are more expensive, but bring a lot more connectivity. The NanoPi M4 for example has PCIe over GPIO's what can fit a 4 x SATA hat. It's hot 2 USB3 controllers for each 2 ports. 

 

That's interesting but the price, 2GB RAM + SATA + BOARD is 90$ - to expensive and if try putting 4 drives which are not 2.5" that doesn't make sense at all compared to an generic x86 mobo. I've moved all of my sata drives to 2 servers (since I already have all of the components), they give more place to play around and you can host VMs. I have now 3 alwinner boards. Orange PI PC + PI ONE + PCDuino 3 Nano. The ONE is used as pi-hole and will be used as vpn gateway probably. Still makes room for the other two boards to run something less resource intensive.  =)

[TornadoZX]

Bump, perhaps someone from the dev team could point me which image would fit the pcduino3nano best, I've tried the cubietruck, now will try banana-pi

[Igor]

20 minutes ago, TornadoZX said:

Bump, perhaps someone from the dev team could point me which image would fit the pcduino3nano best, I've tried the cubietruck, now will try banana-pi

Build one - this board is supported within build tools, but we don't give you warranty that boots. Use EXPERT="yes" when building an image to get access to boards outside support.