Openmediavault vs RPI3: ONE HAPPY CAMPER!
#1
Heart 
This is a pretty touchy-feely post, I don't have any metrics to discuss, and I didn't take any notes, PLUS I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to many folks here, BUT...

I had an RPI3 running OMV with a Plex server for quite some time. Two self-powered 5TB USB 3.0 drives attached as RAID 1, and for the most part it was "fine."

However, over time the Plex client - an Amazon Fire TV stick - started telling me "Your processor isn't beefy enough to transcode this video" more and more often.

After some googling, I landed on the Rock64 as most likely a decent hopeful upgrade - at the VERY least the 4GB version would be a good side-grade and give the system more RAM to play with. So, ordered, arrived and started playing with it last Friday eve.

I used Ayufan's 0.5.15 jessie OMV image and of course it booted right up no worries.

The first challenge I felt I had was, would mdadm recognize the old RAID?  And jumping crappity, it DID! "mdadm --assemble --scan" and it said "started device md127." No complaints whatsoever! 

Set up the old shares no worries, updated plex server, added the library files, and kaPOW I was in business!

Could. Not. Have. Gone. More. Smoothly.

(Actually I take that back. One of the USB drives is also a USB3 hub, and through my tangle of wires I managed to plug it into itself right out of the gate. Haha oops WHERE IS MY DRIVE? Duh.)

On a whim, and since the thing was only using maybe 300mb of RAM, I thought hey, let me take down this SECOND rpi3 that I have running as Minecraft bukkit server, and see if the Rock64 will take it as well.

Had to manually install the Java 8 jdk (shout out to the IRC #Rock64 channel btw, they are super helpful there!) and rebuild the server jar file - but that was also amazingly fast and efficient, and holy crap if it didn't START RIGHT UP ALSO!  I gave it 2gb of RAM and hopped into my old world with my son for a good ol' time.  With a little luck I won't have to restart it daily, too!

And of course, the USB3 kicks ass. Between that and the gigabit, my Plex clients respond lightning-fast.

Can't believe I "made do" with the old server for so long. OH well.  Actually: serverS - two of them. Now running in one. Whee!  There was seriously so much that could have gone wrong that didn't!

(Gush, gush, gush...)

Big Grin
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#2
I have also converted from RPI3.
Plex is a crap for some time already with the new UI and knowing better how to categorise and group "custom" series (wrong Arts, hiding movies, splitting series episodes etc.).
Simple SMB + VLC/Kodi on Xbox One works way better for me and my daughter.
Rock64 is much powerful then RPI 3 Big Grin
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#3
(03-12-2018, 07:25 AM)ElRobbo Wrote: This is a pretty touchy-feely post, I don't have any metrics to discuss, and I didn't take any notes, PLUS I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to many folks here, BUT...

I had an RPI3 running OMV with a Plex server for quite some time. Two self-powered 5TB USB 3.0 drives attached as RAID 1, and for the most part it was "fine."

However, over time the Plex client - an Amazon Fire TV stick - started telling me "Your processor isn't beefy enough to transcode this video" more and more often.

After some googling, I landed on the Rock64 as most likely a decent hopeful upgrade - at the VERY least the 4GB version would be a good side-grade and give the system more RAM to play with. So, ordered, arrived and started playing with it last Friday eve.

I used Ayufan's 0.5.15 jessie OMV image and of course it booted right up no worries.

The first challenge I felt I had was, would mdadm recognize the old RAID?  And jumping crappity, it DID! "mdadm --assemble --scan" and it said "started device md127." No complaints whatsoever! 

Set up the old shares no worries, updated plex server, added the library files, and kaPOW I was in business!

Could. Not. Have. Gone. More. Smoothly.

(Actually I take that back. One of the USB drives is also a USB3 hub, and through my tangle of wires I managed to plug it into itself right out of the gate. Haha oops WHERE IS MY DRIVE? Duh.)

On a whim, and since the thing was only using maybe 300mb of RAM, I thought hey, let me take down this SECOND rpi3 that I have running as Minecraft bukkit server, and see if the Rock64 will take it as well.

Had to manually install the Java 8 jdk (shout out to the IRC #Rock64 channel btw, they are super helpful there!) and rebuild the server jar file - but that was also amazingly fast and efficient, and holy crap if it didn't START RIGHT UP ALSO!  I gave it 2gb of RAM and hopped into my old world with my son for a good ol' time.  With a little luck I won't have to restart it daily, too!

And of course, the USB3 kicks ass. Between that and the gigabit, my Plex clients respond lightning-fast.

Can't believe I "made do" with the old server for so long. OH well.  Actually: serverS - two of them. Now running in one. Whee!  There was seriously so much that could have gone wrong that didn't!

(Gush, gush, gush...)

Big Grin

I'm new to Rock64 and Plex servers.  I'm considering buying a Rock64 to use it as a NAS using OMV.  I am curious about your Plex setup and I have a question about it.  Do you think it would be able to transcode mpeg2 to h.264 on the fly?

I ask because I plan to set up my HDhomerun tuner to watch live TV.  It is my understanding that the Hdhomerun pulls the OTA signal as mpeg2 and to avoid the Plex server from sending it to the Plex client in that large format, it is best for the Plex server to transcode it into a smaller format such as h.264.  My concerns is that on the Plex website, it says that ARM based CPUs are not capable to transcode and if that's the case, then buying a Rock64 wouldn't be the best choice for what I'm trying to do.

I hope my question makes sense.  Thank you in advance for any advice you may have for me.
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