What arm boards are you using?

I am predominately Cubieboards. So far Cubie2 and Cubietruck.

I have one Linksprite_pcDuino3_Nano that I got to learn about arduino, but never did much with it. It was on sale for $10 at the time…

I am looking at the Cubieboard5, but its sata is not native, but has USB under the covers. I would love to find an affordable 4 core with native sata. My experience with my mail server on my Cubietruck is that 2 core bogs down with anti-virus checking. With 4 core, I could have one dedicated to postfix, perhaps. Of course my mailserver is an old RSEL6 setup and that may have something to do with performance.

I have looked a little at armv8 boards. Getting to 64 bit would be nice, but. I am looking for: affordable, 5V, 4 core, native sata. Been a while since I last checked what is on the market.

Having at least a few different types of boards may help here.

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Just had a quick search on 4 core and native sata arm boards.
I think you will end up with a Banana Pi BPI-M2 Berry.
What could have been the ultimate board has been canceled last summer due to memory problems. Rumors are that later this year an N2 version of the Odroid will become available. However, I couldn’t find any info if this board will have native sata…

the armhfp/armv7 collection spans: raspberry 2,3,3+; orangepi- plus, pc; odroid HC1 and beagle bone’s for home automatization.

Have one aarch64 board: odroid C2.

The odroid’s are most valued by me, they do the heavy lifting in development / compiling.

Note the memory footprint of Clam-AV (anti-virus) is about 650-700Mb, in my experience the most commonly provided ram of 1Gb is just a bit to little for it.

I can recommend the odriod HC1, it has an (UAS capable) usb 3.0 to sata bridge, 2Gb ram and 8 cores.
Although it might not fill your wishes: it’s headless, no video / HDMI. And therefor one should not be afraid to hook it up to a serial (uart) to USB bridge.

Do you know Armbian ? It is a Debian based distro for arm boards, and I trust their judgment on hardware / boards worth considering.

I will look into it. I have considered BPi before and have felt good about what they have done and uboot support. Unfortunately their R4 model seems still not to be fully supported in the Kernel.

I have two Odroid HC2s on the way, though I’m not really planning on running Neth on them. Should make for a nice storage brick–onboard SATA as well as a chassis that will hold a 3.5" drive conveniently and provide decent cooling.

The Cubietruck is 2GB; from my mailserver:

$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2050624 1547908 502716 232 239080 717076
-/+ buffers/cache: 591752 1458872
Swap: 4193276 23192 4170084

Aren’t the Odroids 12V? Is there a good enclosed 12V power supply like I get for 5V like the Anker 40W, 5port?

Thanks for the insight of the memory usage in you setup. It kind of proves the point 1G of ram would result in extensive swap usage.

Odroird C2 and HC1 are 5V.
The HC2 is 12V; AFAIK needed to support common 3.5" HDD’s.
Note none of them uses a usb micro connection for power. IMHO an advantage, the USB connector is not rated for such high loads. It’s strange RPI’s 3 and 3+ still utilizes it.

I will look some more at the Odroids. I may well be changing ISPs. I have a Comcast business 5/25GB to my home with static IP, as that was the only way to get static from them. But AT&T fiber at 100GB is here now with static for 1/2 the price. A new box on a new connection…

The Cubies come with a barrel power plug that can support up to 3A. They are also typically sold with the USB to power plug cable; you supply the power supply. YOU CAN power them up from the uUSB connector, and I have when I am not also powering a HD, or mouse/kybd.

As long as you don’t plug a phone (or other smart USB device) into the Anker, it can also provide 3A per port. Well the math is wrong for 5 ports, but then usually a Cubie 2 or truck + HD only needs 2A and 2 x 5 x 5 does = 40W. I see that there are now 50W units available,.

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Looks more like I need the Ultra for 2GB memory…

The Banana Pi M4-Ultra uses the Allwinner R40 chip and according to:

https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort

No sata support until the 4.20 kernel.

So still looking…

I just found a forgotten rpi2 B running kodi behind some books in the cabinet under my TV in my bedroom. I think it must have been there for about 3 years or so. It still worked flawlessly, but I just forgot about the pi, and was not actively used.
So I guess now I have a pi2 to try NS-arm …

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I am not that active in ARM options for NethServer… But I just read new that NVIDIA has released a new arm developer board with (at first glance) very nice specs: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/buy/jetson-nano-devkit?nvid=nv-int-mn-78462
just fyi…

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Any thoughts on this little guy?