Buyng a new board to replace my Banana PI

[pazzoide]

Hello, I'm planning to replace my old (but very good) Banana PI (the first model, it should be called M1 if I remember). I basically use it as my personal cloud server, for some remote daily backups and for messing things up

 

Now I'd like to replace it with something newer and maybe I'll use the Banana just for experimental purpose. So I searched the internet but can't find something that really fits my needs, maybe somebody with more knowledge than me can give me an advice.

 

It should have, at least:
- SATA (which is a feature I can't find in many boards )

- Gigabit Ethernet (a must)

- USB 3 (at least 1 port)

- 1 GB of RAM (2 are better, more it's fine)

- Dual core CPU or more (I don't know much in about CPUs/GPUs) the important thing is that it performs better than the Banana PI especially on single core workload, like for example compressing a big tar.gz.

 

Thank you in advance

[Werner]

Odroid HC4 would feature 2x SATA but no USB3. USB2 only

What about NanoPi M4V2 with 4x SATA hat? Powerful but more expensive

[TRS-80]

Generally speaking, there are several boards meeting your requirements, as "server" use-cases (as opposed to "desktop") have been much better supported for a much longer time now.  I used Cubietruck for such tasks for very long time (and still do) however there are better boards available nowadays for actually even less money (read on).

 

Now to specifics, I used to think SATA was necessary, too, until I read this glowing review of particular USB to SATA adapter by tkaiser (from 2017!).  Surprisingly, this device is still available here.  I have several of them and they have worked well for me.

 

If you are willing to consider such adapter (instead of strictly sticking with SATA requirement, which as you noticed is more rare), this of course open up the possibilities a lot.  When I needed to buy another little "server" board a year or two ago, I chose ODROID-XU4 at that time which are (like Cubietruck) still 32-bit, however still quite powerful with a lot of CPU and USB3 and RAM, etc. and can be had for ~60 USD these days.  Other than the adapter caveat, this meet all your requirements and I think you might be happy with, I know I (and others) have been.  I think they went down in price because they are "only 32-bit" however this means (to me) just a good deal to be had (maybe?).    To make "apples to apples" comparison, you will need to add the price of PSU, eMMC, SATA adapter, etc. to that figure, though.

 

And that is where I personally am at, currently.

 

Now going forward, there are a lot more newer and more interesting boards, especially some of RK3399 (64-bit) based ones as Werner brought up.  One of these will probably be my next purchase at some point.  They will cost a little more (I think?) but as always, add costs of PSU, flash (eMMC or sdcard), etc. to get the full picture on any price comparison.  Some of RK3399 even support fancy stuff like NVMe, etc.

 

One final generality, I always recommend to stick to Armbian Supported Devices list as a starting point for any research.  But you probably know that already.    And remember, even some boards that look great "on paper" can have little gotchas, or be better for this use case or that, e.g., N2 have most raw power in CPU but is limited by I/O.

 

I learned that on some NicoD (YouTube) video, he has made some good ones, maybe you want to check them out.  He is focused more on "desktop" usage, but has a lot more experience with a lot more boards than I do, especially some of these newer ones and so I find his videos still very informative.

 

Let us know your thoughts more and how your research is coming along, if the right person see your post maybe they save you from one particular little problem or another.

[arox]

I have exactly the same need, except I am looking for two identical boards : it is my KISS (*) version of a cluster of application, storage and backup server with disk redundancy. One application and storage online server and an other offline backup/archive server with the same content + the archives. So I can switch the boards in case of failure or restore the content of last day in case of file loss.

 

I use two BPI M1 at present - one having lost its USB ports. One SSD for app and one bigger HDD for bkp. 

So ? SATA is "has been" and is over-performed my new standards but it fulfill my present requirements, and it is a cheap and conservative solution. TRS-80 is wright : the best is to use USB3 and a converter (you will experience a huge improvement comparing BPI), so you are not limited on the choice of the boards and will continue to use the disks for years. Just, some return of experience will be valuable for choosing one : for my desktop, I buyed a uASP able JMicron controller which is allegedly not compatible with a via controller and seems a bit power hungry. 

 

So any modern Rockchip 64 bits, reasonably priced fanless boards that do not consume to much power would do the trick for me. (2 boards and 2 "good" adapters). And with OS on disk, no need for eMMC. 

 

(*) KISS : Keep it simple stupid. Security is antinomic with complexity. And when you experience a hardware failure many years after having put in place the machine and forgotten everything about how it works, the last thing you need is complexity and deprecated, out-of-date, not retro-compatible or not replaceable software or hardware.

[TRS-80]

Since OP was about "server" and now arox mention:

 

6 hours ago, arox said:

a cluster of application, storage and backup server with disk redundancy

 

I guess I will mention I started a thread about such topics, as I am now moving in that direction as well:

 

Self-hosting micro- (or regular) services, containers, homelab, etc.

[pazzoide]

I really have to thank you guys for the good answers. I'll study a bit to understand if those boards and those advises do fit my personal server environment. One question that comes to my mind about the usb to sata converter is that I won't be able to install the whole system on sata disk or will I, nowadays? Btw, hey, I do have a couple of these, but they do not have separate power supply, so I guess they won't receive enough power to run a 2.5" sata disk alone? Maybe some boards will.

Anyway I'll make deeper researches about your suggestions, and if the usb3 to sata adapter works I don't see why to stick with the sata port actually

[Werner]

15 minutes ago, pazzoide said:

I won't be able to install the whole system on sata disk or will I, nowadays?

That is a good question. In theory, if the initramfs contains everything it should be possible. It is also possible to install the system to a common USB stick...there is only one way to find out

[TRS-80]

2 hours ago, pazzoide said:

they do not have separate power supply, so I guess they won't receive enough power to run a 2.5" sata disk alone?

 

Good point!  I forgot to mention...  I am running 4x 3.5" 4TB HDD.  These for sure require additional (12V) power.  In fact there is a standard barrel jack on one side of the SATA part of the adapter for you to supply additional 12V power.  I have an appropriately sized Mean Well power supply which I use to power Cubietruck and all 4 HDDs.  I just rigged up a simple 5 way splitter from some spare wire I had laying around and some of those female and male barrel jacks with the screw terminals.

 

You did not say if your 2.5" SATA disk is HDD or SSD, if the former you might (probably?) need to supply some 12V in addition to 5V which comes from the USB SATA adapter.  I am not sure about an SSD, maybe they can run on 5V alone?  But I don't own this hardware, so you need to make sure for yourself.

[pazzoide]

And the last question that came to my mind is: I have a second USB disk (3.5", powered externally) for backup. So even if USB to sata would provide enough power (or if I find a way to power the disk) and even if the whole system could be installed over USB to SATA, would the USB bus speed be divided between the two USB devices? I think so! That brings me back to a "pure" SATA interface or the performance would be slown down, since I have to backup terabytes of data to the second USB disk.

 

For the question about HDD vs SSD right now I have an HDD running on the Banana but I'll switch to SSD. Do they have different power requirement?

 

 

[Werner]

SSDs usually consums less power than a common harddrive. Also since SSDs are available in 2,5'' only you do not need to worry about 12 volts.

[TRS-80]

10 hours ago, pazzoide said:

would the USB bus speed be divided between the two USB devices? I think so! That brings me back to a "pure" SATA interface or the performance would be slown down

 

Well, at least you are thinking along the right lines, which is better than most. 

 

The arrangement of interfaces varies per board, and is exactly one of those little "gotchas" I was referring to.  Some boards share all USB ports (and even some times, SATA!) on the same bus / interface!  Obviously not ideal.  Where other boards have enough separate USB controllers to put reasonable amount per channel (1 or 2).  And you are right, this makes a big difference in performance.  But this is a per board consideration, and not an indictment of USB to SATA adapters (vs "native" SATA) in general.  A properly implemented board with USB3 to SATA adapter is still going to be faster than a poorly implemented design where everything is shared (e.g., RPi 3), even in some cases if the latter has "native" SATA (which RPi does not, but I hope you take my point).

 

I used to think exactly like you, having some preference for "native" SATA, until I read enough of those old tkaiser posts which convinced me differently.    However, do your own research until you are satisfied...

 

Besides, how often are you doing these TB bulk transfers?  All the time or just once initially?  I would imagine the latter, followed by some incremental backups after that.

 

However you know your own situation best, and as I said most importantly you are asking the right questions.  Which is quite refreshing change from the many posts of people coming here expecting support without doing any research beforehand, if I'm being honest.   

[TRS-80]

Someone brought up the subject of freedom / blob less booting recently, which got me digging through my old thread beginning mid-2019 about the same looking for some references.

 

I realized as I was reading through it however that that some of the recommendations made later on in that thread (beginning Jan 2020 with Helios64 announcement) are not only just about blob-free booting, but in fact are about about RK3399 based boards in general and therefore quite relevant to current discussion.

 

The TL; DR I guess, is, back when I picked up my ODROID-XU4, it was largely because RK3399 were still not stable at that time.  But they are now.  So as some others pointed out, you can get much more powerful board now (e.g., NanoPi M4) for same money.  And they have become stable.  So I guess I have to back away from my ODROID-XU4 recommendation, and point out to put it in context at that time vs now.

 

In fact recent discussions have me back looking much harder at RK3399 stuff again, I am sure I will buy one or more of them for my next board, and I think this is probably where you should look these days, too, for your stated use-case of "general server stuff."

Edited December 18, 2020 by TRS-80
add last 2 paragraph