I'm trying to upgrade to a good gigabit NAS router. I'd like great wifi but the proc and memory must be able to handle samba traffic for my family.
I have a very solid experimental odroid h2+ installed at a backup site (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/) with 16gb memory but it is no longer made. I average about 120 MB/s samba throughput on it daily but it has very weak wifi and wouldn't work well.
I am upgrading from a netgear r7800. It gives me 30 MB/s throughput on samba but chokes up because it doesnt have the 16GB of memory or processor power the h2+ has. The h2+ also has the network ports for me to set it up as a router where as a lot of these other boards dont have but 1 ethernet port so I cant just go buy a new untested hc4.
I tried to go this road a few years ago but ended up setting a dedicated box for each function and never been happier since. So you need an Intel NUC that you should setup as NAS
4Gb of RAM will be more than enough unless you're a heavy user of ZFS (which I doubt is the case) but trying to shoehorn everything onto a SoC that's mainly based for networking will show it's limitations especially if you're low on RAM.
Hey I own a rockpro64 already. It's capable but only has one ethernet. It has android on it right now but if I could get wired WAN and LAN on it, i'd use it right now.
I agree on the x86 processor since that is what my h2+ is.
Yes, I do need a very small footprint. I forgot to mention that.
Repurpose it as NAS running FreeBSD (I'd highly recommend 13.1) or Linux?
I don't know your exact requirements but you can pop in a PCIe SATA controller, there are some reports that cheap ASM1061 based cards can be a bit flakey however. I've only tested using a ASM1166 based card which works fine except that it incorrectly enumerates 32 ports instead of 6 (this seems to be to a hardware/firmware bug in the controller as it both occurs on BSD and Linux). JMB585 should be another good solution which is what https://kobol.io/ used in their Helios64 NAS. I should point out that you will on FreeBSD see perfomance a bit below line speed due to the NIC driver if you use the builtin NIC currently but it works and runs great.
That's good for the LAN and I have considered it but I need to plug into my WAN port for internet and routing. I could use the pcie port to install a NIC but then I can't do the Sata controller like you are suggesting. I may have just answered my own question.
...or just move the NAS functionality to the RocKPro64 and let the R7800 do the rest?
You could also use USB-NIC(s) but I wouldn't recommend doing so personally...
Nevermind, I just looked at it and there is only 1 USB3.0 port and 1 USB-C port. I need at least 3 fast USB ports to make this viable without the SATA controller.
I learned this the hard way about USB-hub on the routers. I'd say about 90% of the USB-hub devices I tested for this purpose have a reset and it will mess up all of your USB devices. /dev/sda is now /dev/sdb and you have to reboot or manually remount the USB devices. I've not found 1 decent USB hub I can trust (even powered hubs) to not send a reset when it gets bogged down.
I think I am going to give the Rockpro64 a chance at being my router. The case and cooling is expensive in my opinion, but I have a PCIe killer networks gaming card my uncle gave me and It'll be able to minimally meet my requirements plus internalize 14TB of data I have running through USB3.0 currently.
I've had good experience with VL817 ( https://www.orico.cc/usmobile/product/detail/id/3307 specifically ) but I can't vouch that it'll work in all situations. You might want to test that PCIe NIC first as it can be a bit picky (due to hardware limitations) about PCIe devices. While I'm not sure what you're going to use I would recommend you to have a look at qbittorrent which uses libtorrent (rasterbar) as it's much more efficient than transmission in my experience however due to dependencies it might be a bit troublesome to port to OpenWrt specifically.
Yea, the killer networks card doesn't have great opensource drivers I guarantee. Can you tell me if USB-C ports work well in openwrt? I just realized I have a USB-C hub I use for my laptop (and the rockpro64 has a usb-c) and it has gigabit ethernet built in, do you think that could be stable enough to host a wan port?
To be honest I haven't used Linux (in any variant) for about a year so I can't really say much about PCIe functionality but you need at least to figure out what chipset that card uses and if it gets detected.
There's a PR for 5.15 https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/9626 which is probably what you want to use as far as OpenWrt goes but I would expect that you need to load drivers for the NIC separately (if there are any available).
You know, I've not come across many times since the pandemic to fire up the coffee pot for a good reason and I have a good reason to now. I'm just going to try this now until it works since diizzy helped me realize I already have all the parts to make this a project a reality. Thanks.
