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Banana PI (pro) vs. A20-OLINUXINO-LIME2


Guest Fischkopp

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Guest Fischkopp

Hello Igor,

Hello community,

 

What I have:

1 Raspberry PI B (its just a toy)

1 Radxa Rock (bad SW support, will replace Odroid C1 in case AP is running stable, maybe never)

2 Banana PIs (file server)

1 Odroid C1 (AD DC and AP, but actually I have no trust in the hardware)

 

since one of my Banana PI has trouble with SATA (will not initialize, but seems to be NO power problem)

I will buy a new A20 board...

 

- Cubieboard 2: too old, no Gigabit LAN, too expensive from my point of view

- Cubietruck: too expensive from my point of view

- Orange PI:  reading forums... seems to have some HW problems, USB Host and/or SATA not functional, etc.)

- Banana PI: I like very much, but why is SATA not working from one day to another

- Banana PI Pro: is it really better than the first BPI, it seems to have more HW trouble, actually I don't need WiFi on the board

- OLINUXINO-LIME2: a bit more expensive than BPI, very interesting board, noise resistant, sounds like good HW design ;)

- do I miss a A20 board?

 

This forum is really nice not bounded to any product... so I would like to ask:

Does anybody have experience with these two boards, I am interested into following:

- quality

- stability

- functionality of Gigabit LAN, SATA, USB

- Image compatibility between BPI and OLINUXINO-LIME2

- Kernel might be the same, is it true?

- known issues of OLINUXINO-LIME2

which board is the best?

 

regards and thank you

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The kernel version and settings might be the same. But since hardware is different some low level drivers will be different that might also affect this and that. Same applies to board initialisation from within u-boot. But you can switch between different boards by simply exchanging SPL+u-boot+kernel and use an otherwise unmodified image with all the boards.

 

I would think about what you can expect if you're after the cheapest device possible (it's neither stability nor realiability  :P )

 

I like the Olimex boards (due to being real OSHW) but still experience worse network and overall performance with my Lime2 compared to the original Banana Pi (no need for the Pro -- if I would need onboard Wi-Fi I would give the BPi M1+ a try -- nearly same connector layout and identical hardware but the chips that might overheat at the upper side of the PCB: http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/Nyiuha/)

 

There's another A20 board that's worth to mention: pcDuino3 Nano. Feature wise comparable to Banana Pi and regarding NAS useage faster than my Lime2: http://forum.lemaker.org/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=12167&pid=66487&fromuid=33332

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Guest Fischkopp

Hello tkaiser,

 

thank you for your response...

I agree BPI M1+ and pcDuino3 nano are nice boards... but so far what I have read today I will buy a third Banana PI in case I cannot fix my SATA Problem...

 

Grüße aus Augsburg

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BTW: For whatever reasons the Banana Pi is still the fastest A20 based board I own regarding NAS useage (I compared myself Banana Pi, Olimex Lime2, pcDuino3 Nano and Lamobo R1 -- the so called 'Banana Pi Router Board' -- the Cubietruck I also own wasn't included in tests since it's productive all the time).

 

Regarding SATA performance all the boards perform nearly identical. But something's different regarding Ethernet (on the Lamobo R1 it's clearly a different situation since there the PHY is not a RTL8211 but the BCM53125 switch IC). Must be something related to timings and maybe crosstalk between different ICs/traces on the PCB.

 

I'll give it again a try with Kernel 4.1 (since pcDuino3 Nano will then be supported officially by mainline) and report back. In the meantime I collected some first results regarding cpufreq/overclocking with 4.0.x, made some tests regarding whether it's worth or not when you want to use the device as NAS server and collected some informations regarding 'factory defaults' vs. optimised settings (applies to default cpufreq as well as network and scheduler settings): http://forum.lemaker.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=15543&fromuid=33332

 

(will be one of my last lengthy and tutorial-like posts there since I currently only use Armbian any more and maybe Igor provides a section 'tutorials/how-to' here or github is the place to write -- we will see)

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Guest Fischkopp

@Igor / @tkaiser

 

Actually the SATA of my Banana PI seems to be broken... some days ago I saw that SATA initialization fails... now there is no failure and still no SATA drive ... :(

(I verified power, images, kernel and cables...)

 

The performance measurement you have done shows that Banana Pi and pcDuino3 Nano are comparable, right?

 

Do you know if I will have trouble using your/Igor's images of BPI or OPI for pcDuino3 Nano?

Or is this board more compatible with cubietruck?

What are the differences? HW seems to be the same...

(I don't want to struggle with building images and kernel, therefor I have Radxa Rock :angry: )

 

Thank you for your help.

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The performance measurement you have done shows that Banana Pi and pcDuino3 Nano are comparable, right?

 

Nope, Banana Pi was always better. But for the next test runs I will wait for kernel 4.1 when pcDuino3 Nano will be officially supported in mainline kernel. I will contact Igor before I modify his scripts to support the board and maybe he'll accept my patches and includes them (without having the hardware and being able to verify himself). We'll see. 

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