I'm contemplating on getting the Banana Pi R2 as router, my intention is to have a 1 gbps network with my 1 gbps internet connection and have the board serve as NAS and backup machine.
any idea how this board will fare with the load?
Thanks.
Looks promising, but I wouldn't expect 1 Gbps NAS transfer.
why is that? cpu too weak?
The OpenWrt team is working on NAT offload right now. The mediatek target should be one of the first to get it. If it currently cannot do gigabit, it will in a few months.
edit: DSA looks like it's implemented so performance should be good right now.
DSA? not sure I follow...
so what you say is that the cpu is too weak, if I'll take a low level cpu from AMD/Intel from the last 5-6 years, it will work, correct?
Network-wise is probably capable of 1Gbps throughput.
The problem is file sharing. From what I have experienced samba is CPU intensive. You might have better luck with unencrypted NFS, if that is an option
x86 is always faster. Just depends how much money you want to spend.
That being said, the r2 is not extraordinarily slower.
my main file sharing method is nfs, samba is a good to have but I won't shed a tear if I'll won't be able to use it for the time being.
I do wonder, assuming I place there my media share and my backup, how much (cpu wise) this might affect nat performance...
it is a size issue, up until now, I wasn't able to find a proper hw setup for x86 which is small enough (I'm a DIY guy when it comes to computers), regardless of size.
I can't "sell" this to my wife, it is too expensive.
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btw, are these mini-itx boards with 2 or 4 cpus (intel or amd) will suffice for 1 gbps nat, media share and backups?
I previously had ASRock J3160-ITX, which had a quad-core 2.2 GHz CPU.
It was decent, but I was not quite satisfied, so I went ham and got an Intel i3 8100 CPU + MSI Z370M + 16 GB DDR4 + SSD + Aerocool CS-101 Slim case + Compex WLE1216v5-20 (which is not currently support very well - no 160 MHz) + WiGig (2 x Dell WLD15 + Intel 17265) + some other shit, which runs ESXi with a bunch of VMs (one of them is OpenWRT). Don't ask why.
I still have the J3160-ITX laying around. If you want I can boot it up and do some tests for you. I previously ran Windows 10 on it with 3 HDDs in a Storage Space pool shared via network (samba). The network file transfer was 200-400 Mbps (over a weird setup).
so I've contacted the vendor, it seem that they have a special openwrt image with their own hw nat which gives ~1Gbps. the sata R/W numbers are ok, the issue is the wlan, it isn't good nor stable. their fix for it is to write a new driver for a new module that can be purchased and attached to the mini pcie instead of fixing the driver.
in case anyone is interested to know.
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