Samba Server

[tkaiser]

Do you really believe Pine64 is the first ARM based SBC on this planet?

Of course not. If you read the whole thread, you can see that i mention i have a Pi B+

OK, I always forget about Raspberry Pis since they all are just an insane joke when it's about NAS/server usage due to their single USB2.0 connection to the outside all USB ports and the slow Fast Ethernet adapter have to share (of course blocking each other).

With real SBC you'll have a look which interfaces are connected in which way, test them individually and then you already know what to expect. For Pine64+ or any other sunxi board that lacks SATA but features GbE this is easy since: USB2.0 + BSP kernel + GbE Ethernet = ~30MB/s (with mainline kernel and UASP it gets close to 38MB/s).

I did some measurements of course neither using Windows nor Samba but OS X and Netatalk instead (fresh debs for Netatalk 3.19dev + requirements available here)

Netatalk is pretty good in caching so I used 3 GB filesize, the settings from here (IRQs distributed accross CPU cores, some network tunables enabled) and also some ionice/taskset tweaking. Best conditions tested with a 3.5" Seagate Barracuda (usual bus powered 2.5" disks do not work on Pine64 since current is limited to 650mA):




Worst conditions (I disabled the ionice/taskset stuff and limited max cpufreq to our current minimum 480 MHz):



With Samba you will most probably end up with 2-3 MB/s less but even the worst case scenario (using a wrong cpufreq governor that never increases CPU clockspeeds or a silly enclosure leading to constant overheating/throttling) outperforms any Raspberry easily.

Regarding cheap: Nope, Pine64/Pine64+ aren't cheap when you want to build a good NAS. High shipping costs combined with only one real USB2.0 host port... not the best idea.

H3 based boards are way better suited if you take care that you get a board that exposes all 3 USB host ports and the OTG port too (eg Orange Pi Plus 2E said to be available at the end of this week for less than $40 including shipping to most locations)