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Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

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Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#91

Post by flyinghamster »

drdaeman wrote: post #79

This seems to be low-power entry-level stuff. I'm curious, is there anything more serious - but less serious than some proper rack server hardware? Currently I'm running a home server on EPYC 3251 mini-ITX board, which I use to route 1GbE WAN and 10GbE LAN, serve as a NAS, and run a bunch of services all without it breaking a sweat, and leaving plenty of headroom shall I want to run more stuff there. It sits on my de…

At this point, if you want a quiet, high-performance ARM system for home, Apple is worth a look, even if that means your "server" storage is plugged into Thunderbolt (and keeping in mind the Apple premium for RAM and internal storage).

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#92

Post by flyinghamster »

djhworld wrote: post #4
rcarmo wrote: post #3

I set up Proxmox on one of my Pi 4s (using an external SSD) and am quite happy with it. Runs four different LXC containers (one of which is a public-facing ActivityPub server for testing) and gives me zero headaches, so am currently looking for a beefier alternative that has a proper M.2 slot and at least 16GB of RAM... I do wish that alternative boards had better OS support (especially the Rockchip ones, which tend…

I moved from a Pi setup to a second hand Lenovo M900 tiny PC, with 24GB of RAM and nvme drive and it works great. The power efficiency is obviously not as good as the Pi but it's a reasonable trade off

Tiny PCs are a good option, too - especially ones based on mobile processors. I just built up a barebone Asus PN50 (Ryzen 7 4700U equipped) and I'm quite impressed at what this little box can do. The 4700U is kind of weird - it has SMT disabled, so it kind of slots between the usual Ryzen 5s and 7s. No matter though - builds on it are quite fast. But it's still x86...

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#94

Post by MobiusHorizons »

irusensei wrote: post #89
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #74

I have this same board running freebsd as a NAS. It has been a pretty great experience overall. My main gripe has been that I would really like to be able to run an nvme drive for a cache at the same time as SATA ports, and I haven't found any cost effective PCIE2.0 x4 switches that I could use for that purpose. There is an x1 switch for use with RP4, but it is a shame to lose all the bandwidth. I'm looking forward t…

Issue with FreeBSD on RockPro64 and similar boards is that the scheduler doesnt support big.little configurations therefore the OS doesnt make distinctions between the 2 A72 cores and the weaker A55s. https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/RockChip#Known_issues

It’s true, but performance has honestly been great. It’s still quite responsive over ssh under load.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#95

Post by drdaeman »

jrockway wrote: post #82
drdaeman wrote: post #79

This seems to be low-power entry-level stuff. I'm curious, is there anything more serious - but less serious than some proper rack server hardware? Currently I'm running a home server on EPYC 3251 mini-ITX board, which I use to route 1GbE WAN and 10GbE LAN, serve as a NAS, and run a bunch of services all without it breaking a sweat, and leaving plenty of headroom shall I want to run more stuff there. It sits on my de…

I'm interested too and have pretty much come to the same conclusion as you. There are workstations like this: https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstatio... It's a middle ground between Raspberry Pi and a 128 core they sell to cloud providers. For the money, you can probably get more work done with an amd64 workstation, unless you're paying someone to generate your electricity by riding a bicycle or…

Goodness gracious, five grand, only 3 drive bays, and that's without drives? My whole AMD machine (motherboard, RAM, PSU, NVMe SSD, case - basically everything except for the HDDs for the bulk storage) costed me slightly less than $2k, and I've surely overprovisioned.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#97

Post by sliken »

daneel_w wrote: post #5
rcarmo wrote: post #3

I set up Proxmox on one of my Pi 4s (using an external SSD) and am quite happy with it. Runs four different LXC containers (one of which is a public-facing ActivityPub server for testing) and gives me zero headaches, so am currently looking for a beefier alternative that has a proper M.2 slot and at least 16GB of RAM... I do wish that alternative boards had better OS support (especially the Rockchip ones, which tend…

The beefier alternative you're looking for is possibly the Radxa Rock5B, which has proper M.2 slot and comes in a 16GB version. Hardware support for it isn't entirely mainlined yet, but a lot of development is happening week by week. Debian runs well on it.

Or any of the Rockhip 3588 boards. Better CPU, better PCIe, some have dual 2.5gbe, 4, 8 or 16gb ram, etc. I got the NanoPi R6s.

Seems silly to save $25 on the slower CPU and half the ram.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#98

Post by sliken »

doublepg23 wrote: post #12
lostlogin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bit of a sledgehammer approach, but a Nuc with Proxmox is pretty excellent. You can even use 10gbe via thunderbolt (or the pci slot on the larger Nucs).

This is the way. An x86 NUC/Mini PC/Thin client smokes the ARM SBC market.

Dunno, got some numbers to back that up?

So far I'm pretty impressed with my Rk3588 board, 8gb ram, and dual 2.5gbe.

It's a bit more than half as fast as my quad core/8 thread xeon desktop, but that's abotu where I'd expect one of the cheaper x86 NUC/Mini PC/Thin clients to land.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#99

Post by sliken »

johnklos wrote: post #37
tbrock wrote: post #23

You could do this for cheaper (and with more ram) using a raspberry pi 4 with a usb nvme ssd, it’s got gigabit ethernet and is arm64. Sure you have two less cores than this solution but it’s more likely to be supported over time and once you get the SD card out of the mix the I/O is solid. I’ve been surprised by how much the SD card throughput was limiting the experience. I run arch Linux arm on mine and it’s a fanta…

> cheaper No, you can't, unless you know of some source of retail priced Raspberry Pi 4s. In some basic tests (compiling, ffmpeg), the Pi 4 and the Rock Pro 64 are within a small percentage of difference in performance.

Indeed, but the much nicer/faster/better PCIe and faster CPUs in the RK3588 for another $25, with the option to get double the ram of the top RPi 4.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#100

Post by EnigmaCurry »

prmoustache wrote: post #86

What's with arm sbc users not setting up any disk encryption? I have yet to see a guide / tutorial / experience reports that do not totally skip the subject.

Check this out, even has SSH unlock - https://gist.github.com/devgioele/e897c341b8d1c18d58b44ffe21...
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