Hi folks, been pondering whether or not to do the conversion from stock to openwrt. Has anyone done the changeover that could give me any insight? Aside from obviously more developed firmware are there any advantages, such as better transfer rates, possibly better power usage? Security isn't a big issue, its only used at home . Just trying to squeeze whatever life out of it efficiently. TIA
This seems to be a Marvell Kirkwood device. But it's not on this page in the Kirkwood section: https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc/soc.marvell
Kirkwood is a well-understood platform by now, has had mainline kernel and Debian support for many years, so it could be supportable.
Transfer rates will most likely go down at least as far as SMB goes as Samba 4.X is much more computing intensive then Samba 3.X. If you feel a bit adventurous you could try cifsd but I wouldn't trust it yet with my data. NFS(v3) should on the other hand perform quite well despite the aging hardware but don't expect any speed records. What you also should have in mind is that ARMv5 is very old hardware by now and I wouldn't be surprised if support upstream (Linux kernel etc) will remove support soon especially as GCC 9 dropped support for ARMv5.
https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=b232e6b58e3766bc66fe08fdb7bcba1bdadda8a2
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-9-Dropping-Older-ARM
Honestly I think you're going to spend more time than what it's worth on this project. Finding a cheap/relatively cheap NAS-like device with decent hardware is next to impossible and even hardware if you want something supported out of the box. In terms of price / performance your probably best off looking at the Espressobin or https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=234 + the SATA HAT although neither have a nice case. The Espressobin is supported by OpenWrt if you so prefer while NanoPi M4 using the SoC RK3399 isn't supported for now at least by OpenWrt.
its been in the openwrt list for a long while https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/kirkwood/generic/openwrt-kirkwood-iom_ix2_200-squashfs-factory.bin. Plenty of readme's on how to do it, just not sure if its worth it.
@Diizzy thanks for the input like to here opinions and other expertise. Hopefully someone that's done it can chime in. 