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Allwinner home server
Nowadays a lot of inexpensive NAS servers are available from several sources. However, I think that these units are not as transparent as one would like. Therefore I think it's better to build your own. This article will mostly focus the hardware aspects. The software side is what
The following questions come up when building such a unit.
- What Single Board computer to use?
- Which hard disk?
- How to Powering it all?
- Which Mechanical enclosure for the entire setup?
The basic idea is to take a dual 3.5 inch hard drive enclosure. Put a big ass 3 TB drive in one slot and fiddle a single board computer in the other slot. Steal the 5V power from the enclosure and route the SATA and ethernet where necessary. See this example on how to do this.
Which Single board Computer?
As main control for the NAS I have the following requirements:
- Good Ethernet connection. Either 100Mbit or Gigabit
- SATA interface
- 1Gb RAM for running other services.
- Small form factor that fits inside a 3.5 “ drive bay.
- USB interface to cennect extra drives.
One of the most popular SBC's (Single Board Computers) for hobby projects is the Raspaberry Pi. While it makes a good Media Player, the Pi doesn't have a SATA interface. Also the Ethernet port goes via the USB port, which slows a lot down.
If you look for a somewhat faster SBC. The boards based around the Allwinner A10 or A20 come up. They both offer a SATA interface and have a direct connection for the Ethernet connection. The A20 offers a Gigabit Ethernet port and has 2 1Ghz CPU cores. If you want to make a media player with it, that's also a possibility. In the second half of this year, the Allwinner A80 was introduced and several suppliers already have boards available. I find the A80 too overpowered, new and expensive to become a contender.
The first series to come out with these CPU's were the Cubie board and Cubie truck. These are really complete boards but also coast a lot. Nowadays, there also exist the Banana Pi, Banana Pro and PCDuino family of SBC's around the Allwinner A20. The A10 models have recently been retired and succeeded by the A20. So that reduces at least one decision to make.
| Model | RAM | Flash | Video Out | Debian support | size | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (GiB) | (GiB) | (type) | (Y/N) | (l*w*h mm) | (EUR) | |
| Cubietruck | 2 | 8 | VGA/HDMI | Y | 110×80 | 95 |
| Cubieboard2 | 1 | 4 | HDMI | Y | 100×60 | 71 |
| Banana Pi | 1 | 0 | HDMI | Y | 92×60 | 42 |
| Banana Pro | 1 | 0 | HDMI | N | 92×60 | 55 |
| PcDuino3 nano | 1 | 4 | HDMI | N | 92×54 | 55 |
The board should also fit inside a 3.5 inch hard drive bay. 147* 101.6 * 17.8 mm (l*w*h) And I would like to attach some cables to it. So smaller is better.
It seems that the Banana Pro is a chinese rip-off, which probably doesn't have that much support for too long. So better leave it out.
Prices were taken from http://embeddedcomputer.nl, which carried all the mentioned bords. Some of the boards were on discount, so watch out for any changes. Other suppliers include http://conrad.nl and http://reichelt.nl which might be cheaper.
If I look at the main specifications, both cubieboards price themselves out of the market. They both have a lot of peripherals, which I probably don't use. Bot Banana boards don't have on board flash, which means you have to use the extra SD card. Which costs around 12 EUR and has a speed penalty.
That leaves the PCDuino3 Nano. Which has official support for Ubuntu and Android. Has a forum and Google+ group. Also I found a blog which uses this board and it runs Debian. Reichelt stock them for 45.65 EUR and Conrad for 53.99 EUR.
Considering this project, the form factor works out. The SATA connector sticks out from the middle of the board. So an angled SATA connector should be able to fit in this enclosure.