Samba Server

[rahlquist]

I dont believe the Pine64 or virtually any SBC is a good viable NAS device.

It depends. For some special use cases A20 based devices (A20 has a real SATA implementation) are great. Last year rumours were spread that we'll see a quad core A20 successor this year. Interestingly in A64 BSP (both 1.2 and 2.0) nove, a linux-sunxi dev, found references for a not yet available A20E (dual core ARMv7 with higher CPU and DRAM clockspeeds but still pin compatible)

If A20E would show higher sequential SATA write speeds it gets interesting again. 

We use A20 and H3 devices at customers in a 'dual role'. They do their normal job (eg. authenticated scan/print server doing also some GPIO stuff) and serve also as NAS since they're able to. A64 is rather limited in this regard due to lack of bandwidth.

Yeah I guess I should have qualified that a bit better. I've had a linux server of some sort under my roof since 2000. They never cost more than $450 to build and performance compared to a SBC... yeah no comparing. 

Making the argument that say I needed a small samba based NAS, say 4tb and say we use the same drive and headless config between an X86 and SBC, the savings, is likely going to be maybe $50-75 after you build comparably reliable systems. If a mature SBC was used it would be worth it, but with Pine64 its still wayyyy to immature for me to trust even with disposable data. 

Now if I needed gpio capability for additional pieces, well then SBC would have a shot.