On 05/22/2012 03:10 PM, Ian Perkins wrote: > > > On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at redsleeve.org > <mailto:gordan at redsleeve.org>> wrote: > > The Sabre Lite board would be a little over budget for me at present, > alas, and there is the 4-6 week lead time, although as an old server > admin it has a very high degree of appeal.
I know what you mean. The main reason why I got (and may well get more) of the SBC-A510 boards is because they are ATX and have a PCI slot and a mini-PCIe slot (can't use both at once, sadly). That means I can take an off-the-shelf case with an off the shelf SATA controller (possibly an off-the-shelf mini-PCIe -> full size PCIe ribbon+PCB adapter to use a PCIe SATA controller) and have a working NAS (or desktop, these things have VGA and USB ports, or something else entirely, having PCI/PCIe opens up a lot of options) without using any obscure components (or worse, having to have my own made). > Has anybody had any success > with a Pandaboard ES? (apologies for not scouring the lists before > asking). I also have visions of a possible NAS I didn't think Pandaboard ES had a PCI/PCIe slot or SATA... > IIRC it was something like ?300 each here in UK. But they will only > sell you one if you first buy an "evaluation kit" for ?600 or so. I > got the evaluation kit (which is little more than a serial cable and > a year's support contract) because I didn't really have much choice, > so if you decide you want one send me an email off-list, I should be > able to proxy it for you and save you the evaluation kit fees. > > > Thanks for the very kind offer, but my budget is, er, "somewhat less" No problem. :) > I'm planning to try one of these boards in my next NAS (a backup for > the backup, and for hacking on and testing of the ZoL (ZFS on Linux) > on ARM. > > > I have messed with ZFS on FreeBSD in the past. Is brtfs a possibility? > (er, sorry to stray so far off topic) Having had some discussions on the BTRFS mailing list that convinced me that the devlopers and architects of BTRFS don't really know what they are talking about. You can start reading here: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg07822.html and follow the thread. Not to mention that ZoL implementation is way ahead (for a start, it's feature-complete). Some of the features that ZFS has that BTRFS doesn't (and in some cases will not) have: - Parity RAID (n+[123]) - Inline deduplication - Clever avoidance-by-design of parity RAID read-modify-write cycle (which obliterates performance of traditional parity RAIDs) For these reasons I gave up on BTRFS, stopped following it, and very much doubt I will be looking at it in the future. ZFS is just too good in comparison. > That is a _sweet_ board! I wasn't aware of it. Thank you for > pointing it out. :) Quad core A9 sounds quite awesome. In fact, at > $300, that is as good value as a Toshiba AC100 both per core and per > MB of RAM. I'll have to look into it - might just be a tidier > solution for my RedSleeve package build farm. :) > > > I am seriously tempted to just go ahead and shell out the $$$ for it. > Seriously. Really. If you do, please do post a howto on getting RedSleeve up and running on it. :) Gordan
