Usenet server: Wandboard vs Odroid-U2

[NickMaverick]

I saw the Nitrogen6X too. Would be a nice board, but even without the case its a lot more expensive than what I had planned. Including the case and the 2GB RAM upgrade (which would basically give you a Wandboard with a quad core CPU and 2GB RAM or a U2 with Gbit LAN) it would run you $300 + shipping. That's a lot more than what I had in mind when I wanted something a little beefier than an RPi.
I'm probably going to stick with my current setup for a while too and wait until something comes along that solves all my problems. :-)

[bluc]

Yea more than I wanted to spend to, things tend to snowball when I "upgrade" go to buy a raspberry pi and end up with i7 lol. But the review I posted earlier said the dual core wandboard felt sluggish while running Ubuntu, and I just have a gut feeling if I buy anything under a quad I will regret it, and same with the gigabit network. Just don't want to spend more and regret it.

[NickMaverick]

Yeah, same with me. I keep looking for better specs until I decide it's too expensive and then I think I probably don't even need all that performance and start over at the bottom...
I read that too and it worried me. But I think that might have been before the HW acc. drivers were out.
In this youtube video it doesn't look very sluggish. If anything is sluggish I'd bet it's due to the GUI/Unity. When you use the board as a server you don't need a smooth GUI anyways and you can even turn it off to free some CPU load. You could also install a lighter version of Ubuntu, e.g. Xubuntu.
But again, I think with the right drivers the Wandboard will run the GUI pretty smoothly.

I would reget it too if I ended up needing that performance. But I keep thinking that if the setup is feasible, if slow, on an RPi (see one of my earlier links) then a Wandboard wouldn't leave you wanting more.

[buffhr]

I guess this is always depending on what your requirements are, however I would never imagine running sab on anything so "low" power. This also depends on your usual media that you fetch with Sab. But in My case I fetch alot of 25+gb files and well currently I can see sab on a quadcore amd 955 with 8 gigs of ram using 2x 7200 rpm wb black drives in raid 1 as incomplete+complete drives takes the full system cpu+5+gigs of ram and still takes over 30 minutes to unpack+repair. However lets say files of 400mb or less are done within 1 sec without repair...

While a 40 gig file run off a synology nas(1812+) witch has a 1.6 or 2gig dualcore arm processor takes over 3hrs to repair and unpack to me thats way too long...

[bluc]

Yea for 25gb file looking at 5 + hours to unrar and repair with the raspberry pi. While it works it isn't ideal if I could cut it by half to 3/4 would be happy. Then the conundrum of moving the files the couch potato way over Ethernet or walk over unplug storage and plug into desired pc. Trying to stick with original idea of always on low power unit. Some universal benchmarks on socs would be helpful.

[NickMaverick]

buffhr, thanks for your input.
My current setup is an old Acer Aspire 1960, which has a Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) and 512MB RAM. Download folder is on the internal HDD, the final folder is on a USB2.0 external HDD. The logs in SAB tell me that it spends 4:44 unpacking a 2.7 GB file and 2:45 unpacking a 1.2 GB file, so basically it unpacks about 8 MB/sec. Though I don't know for certain if/which of those files were rared. Those are pretty acceptable times to me. So if the WB/U2 could provide speeds that are even a little faster (most importantly not slower) while consuming less power I'm happy, I guess.
May I ask, what files do you download, that are 40GB?

[bluc]

I may even re consider an Intel nuc mini pc to use as htpc and a sab unit. But power usage jumps a fair bit when going to one of them.

Just had a thought with the new wireless ac standard what's likely hood of Ubuntu taking up support for the ac dongle or would that depend on device manufacturers? Would be one way round the network speed on the odroid-u2. Think wireless ac allows speed up to 3Gb just realised usb 2 is limited to 480Mb scrap that idea.

[bluc]

Ok after more research I think I may have worked out what I will get. You can get a gigabit to usb2 adapter and going by this review http://www.amazon.com/review/R125JUZI9V ... JUZI9VS708 the reviewer managed to get 312Mbps. My gigabit network mostly works at about 96Mbps. So one of those adapters while it will never be full gigabit its quite an improvement over 100Mb speed.
So unless something drastic happens between now and Tuesday I will order an odroid-u2 and one of these dongles Main reason for choosing odroid is the large community.

[NickMaverick]

I never really thought about a USB-Ethernet adapter, but it certaily looks like a good solution. This probably decides it for me as well and I'll go for the U2. I don't think I will buy the adapter right off the bat though, but it's comforting to know that there is a way to increase network performance, should I decide to do more in the LAN.
Please report your experiences, both with the U2 and Sab etc and with the adapter, when you have played with it a little. Thanks and good luck.

[bluc]

No problems cheers Just placed my order so a done deal I got the 16GB emmc as well . Didnt worry about power adapter will get one local so don't have to use an adapter as well. Plan on getting the ethernet adapter and one of the cases http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ODROID-Case- ... 246wt_1163 in near future.

[bluc]

Got my odroid-u2 yesterday have not set it up yet but general browser and stuff after using the raspberry pi it literally feels like using an intel i3 pc very snappy. Will spend today setting it up.

[bluc]

New quad core wandboard looks good also may get one of them as a more permanant solution.

[NickMaverick]

I just saw that, was going to post it here too.
How are you doing with your U2? Have you set it up yet?

[bluc]

Yea miles ahead of pi was hoping to use it as a backend tv tuner server as well but could not get the tv tuner installed, involved re compiling the kernel wich at this stage is over my head. Being able to boot a sata drive and having gigabit Ethernet makes wandboard look mighty good

[NickMaverick]

Have you set it up as a download/media server? Is that working well? Or are you suffering from the low lan speed?