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Recommendation for new board


bob_janes

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I have used banana pro for several years now as samba server for a sata drive, and pihole/openvpn server. My operating system Is:

 

ARMBIAN 5.87.190520 nightly Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) 5.1.3-sunxi .

 

I have tried several stable distributions before the may 5, 2019 nightly build, but all have the same issues.

 

1) Every few days I will loose network connectivity. The board is on, I can see that, but I can not ssh into it. Even the hdmi console will not respond. Apparently, the system just hangs somewhere.

2) There are times when network is fine, I can ssh, but openvpn server just stops responding. Restarting openvpn server does not do make it work. I have to reboot the system to get everything to work.

 

So to avoid all that, I have created a cron job to reboot the system every night at 4 am. So far so good.

 

I am afraid that either my board is failing, or the power supply is failing. I have use this board for 4 years, so I happy to retire it and buy a new board.

 

I need recommendation to replace banana pro. I have a sata drive that I want to use it as NAS, and also use the board as pihole and vpn server. If the board is powerful, I may use it as apache sever using wordpress software for publishing blogs. Right now I am using Pogoplug V4 for that purpose, and I can retire that also.

I do not need to use it for kodi or video, but an hdmi port would be nice, since I do use it with xfce desktop to do some of my computer science programming and machine learning assignments.

 

Thank  you for any recommendation in advance. By the way my budget is $100 to $150 including a case and microsd card if needed.

 

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With this budget, any well supported board with rk3399 and a good sata2usb3 converter will make the job.

The NanoPi M4 with its big heatsink can be nice for less than 72$ without shipping fees. For similar price you've got also the rockpro64.

The Odroid N2 (or Khadas Vim3 launching soon) could be nice also, but amlogic S922x is a recent soc and current boards are not officially supported event if there are good progress.

 

If you absolutely want a sata port, an odroid hc1 is cheap and interesting but there is no hdmi output. For both sata and hdmi, you can look at the Odroid H2 (based on intel J4105) but it's out of stock and you have to add ddr4 ram. The main advantage of this last one, is that you are on an x86 soc, so any "standard" linux distribution may work quite out of the box.

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I would definitively not put all these stuff on one board... If something messes.. your entire network will be in trouble including all the data on the nas.

 

check the PSU, if it's only that.. the board can still serve as a NAS, and thanks to the new patches for its sata implementation.. it shouldn't be a bad one..

 

rk3399 is powerful for a lot of your other tasks.. but still wip.. and things might change here.. means the risk is higher that things break as well. for the blog/webserver stuff.. As long as you don't expect much visitors there.. a cheap H3 might do it.. and for pihole no idea.. probably one with GbE, not my field..

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Thanks jeanrhum and chwe. I am looking at your suggestions.

 

While waiting for a reply here, I came across bananpi m2 ultra. It has sata interface as well as GbE. Only problem is that armbian is available but not supported. Do you think it might work?

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I need some advise on RK3399 board. I looked at orange pi rk3399 because it has a sata support. However, going through the posts here, it sounded a little scary, i.e.  TP50265 shorting to allow booting from sd card before writing it to eMMC.

 

Is there any other RK3399 board with sata support I can buy?

 

Thanks.

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On 6/18/2019 at 10:44 PM, renedis said:

NanoPi M4 or RockPro64 indeed. A OrangePI 3 would do the job also if the PCI-E was OK.

I have compared nanopi m4 with rockpro64 and settled on naopi m4. For sata support, I will also get sata hat which will support 4 sata drives.

 

Can you please help me with these questions before I place the order.

 

0) For my needs is 2gb ram enough or do i get 4 gb for another $30? 

 

1) I have only one sata drive. It is 3 terabyte inside an enclosure which has its own power supply, and an esata port. I had connected that drive to Banana Pro sata input with a esata/sata cable (one end esata into enclosure and other into banano pro sata input). Will this cable also work with sata hat?

 

2) Since I have only one drive with it's own power supply, and additionally since I will be only using this board as a pihole, openvip, and webserver, do I need to by any fan or heatsink?

 

3) And finally, I could not find any acrylic or metal case to protect the board. Is there such a case? Since my board will be lying out on my office desk, just worried about having this run 24/7 without any protective case.

 

Thanks  for any replies and help.

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I haven't this board, but here is my opinion about your questions:

0) 2G RAM may be enough since zram can increase it and it's activated by default in recent images.

1) I don't see real hardware differences between your current config and the new one, but I can't give you any guarantee it'll work.

2) It mainly depends on your use case and the loads you expect on the board. But it'll be much more powerful than your existing hardwares. I'll recommend the aluminium heatsink to avoid too much throttling.

3) A quick search on google gave me a like to thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3313324, but you have to print it. The main problem is the sata hat, and the way to integrate your external drive.

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9 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

I haven't this board, but here is my opinion about your questions:

 

Thanks jeanrhum.

 

I am little concerned about rk3399 boards after watching this review of 6  rk3399 boards. The conclusion was that the chip is fine for android but not for desktop. Since I will be using the linux desktop for computer science programming assignments, I am not sure what to do.

 

Do you or anyone else has a feedback on this video? Please fast forward to 4 minutes to hear his conclusion about horrible linux desktop performance.

 

 

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I don't agree with desktop horrible performance. I already use an s912 board as a small dev computer and it's a bit slow because of mali performance with a browser, but otherwise it works well.

rk3399 is better on all point. I just bought a khadas edge-v and I plan to use it instead my s912 box. thanks to JMCC script, I expect enough performance for a smooth desktop usage:

 

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17 hours ago, bob_janes said:

Thanks jeanrhum.

 

I am little concerned about rk3399 boards after watching this review of 6  rk3399 boards. The conclusion was that the chip is fine for android but not for desktop. Since I will be using the linux desktop for computer science programming assignments, I am not sure what to do.

 

Do you or anyone else has a feedback on this video? Please fast forward to 4 minutes to hear his conclusion about horrible linux desktop performance.

The performance of RK3399 is very good and if you do not play Windows games, it is able to replace the average home PC with Linux. Even without the addition of HW support for full-screen video, (in SW mode) the rk3399 works seamlessly with the 1080 desktop in all modes and without brakes. Conclusion about the unsuitability rk3399 Linux - sheer stupidity or intentional deception. But it is important to understand that to get all the performance of this powerful processor, it and the whole system needs a good cooling system and a good medium (the device from which the system starts). Only in this case rk3399 will be able to show all his abilities. For example , you can take a shitty SD card and then yell that the system is slow compared to the Android system that is run from eMMC. Or use a bad cooling system. The main disadvantage rk3399 , it is a  heat at work, but with the release of rk3588 is significantly change. :)

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7 hours ago, balbes150 said:

The performance of RK3399 is very good :)

 

9 hours ago, jeanrhum said:

I don't agree with desktop horrible performance.

 

Thanks for the response jeanrhum and balbes150. Being a novice in this field, I was nervous, but your testimony helps me to go ahead and order the board. As you already know, it is not just just the money, but significant amount of time novice like me have to spend on getting the system to work. My goal is to use get rid of virtual machine on my Window 10 pc to do linux homework, and use this board with Linux Desktop to do all that work, in addition to use the board as file, openvpn and pihole server.

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9 minutes ago, bob_janes said:

My goal is to use get rid of virtual machine on my Window 10 pc to do linux homework

Just as a side note : you can also do the reverse, installing Ubuntu as you main OS and use VirtualBox to run Win10 inside a VM ... :P

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5 hours ago, martinayotte said:

Just as a side note : you can also do the reverse, installing Ubuntu as you main OS and use VirtualBox to run Win10 inside a VM ... :P

I have mostly used Armbian stretch on banana pro. Will Debian provide the same functionality, or do I have to switch to Ubuntu when this board arrives? 

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12 hours ago, martinayotte said:

Just as a side note : you can also do the reverse, installing Ubuntu as you main OS and use VirtualBox to run Win10 inside a VM .

or install all the necessary systems (Win Debian Ubuntu etc) together and select the desired system when you turn on your PC. This is much better than using virtual versions. :)

 

By the way, if you already have Win10 installed, you can install Debian and Ubuntu on your PC.

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On 6/23/2019 at 1:49 AM, balbes150 said:

install all the necessary systems (Win Debian Ubuntu etc) together and select the desired system when you turn on your PC. This is much better than using virtual versions.

VMs are a must, hosts should not be connected to IP networks for security but the VMs can. VMs can be generated on the fly using templates (file copies).  It is far easier to blow away a file than a partition. The goal should be to run more VMs simultaneously, not rid of them. :)

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