Banana versus raspberry pi

[IDM]

Hi I have used both a raspberry pi 2 and 3 and you can obviously tell that the pi 3 responds quicker than the 2. I was however wondering how the Banana pi might fare. Id did find an online article that said the Banana pi is faster when working a s a NAS for upload and download. However, I see the CPU is slower. The banana pi seems attractive as it has SATA which seems better than using a USB 2.0.

Does anybody have experience of how the banana pi compares to the raspberry pi 3? It's the access time and search and load speed that interest me.

Thanks in advance.
Ian

[Pepsican]

(14-08-2017 09:09)IDM Wrote:  Hi I have used both a raspberry pi 2 and 3 and you can obviously tell that the pi 3 responds quicker than the 2. I was however wondering how the Banana pi might fare. Id did find an online article that said the Banana pi is faster when working a s a NAS for upload and download. However, I see the CPU is slower. The banana pi seems attractive as it has SATA which seems better than using a USB 2.0.

Does anybody have experience of how the banana pi compares to the raspberry pi 3? It's the access time and search and load speed that interest me.

Thanks in advance.
Ian

If you really want faster, check out an Odroid by Hardkernel. Similarly priced, faster and without some of the Pi's architectural limitations (i.e. separate network and USB controller, which avoids a network bottle neck).

The article you found seems to allude that the Banana Pi also has resolved the I/O bottleneck by using separate controllers for USB and network.

But which board are you actually interested in? On the Banana Pi website I found at least half a dozen boards you could use.

[IDM]

That is a good question. When i first posted I hadn't realised how many different versions there were (I am ore used to Raspberry pi's). I wan one with a SATA interface to avoid using the HDD via USB2.0. So for a cheap price the Banana Pi M2 Berry, or the slightly older Banana pi 1 or the pro version would work. I assume the M2 Berry version would be better as it had a quad core 1GHz processor.

I will look into the other boards you mention as I am unfamiliar with them.

I should probably add that I currently use an old Raspberry pi B, which performs ok but does take time to find music and when I copy new files it can take a very long time. I also have a Pi 3 which is faster at copying music but is still a bit slow. Hence the question

Regards,
Ian

[Pepsican]

(18-08-2017 13:27)IDM Wrote:  That is a good question. When i first posted I hadn't realised how many different versions there were (I am ore used to Raspberry pi's). I wan one with a SATA interface to avoid using the HDD via USB2.0. So for a cheap price the Banana Pi M2 Berry, or the slightly older Banana pi 1 or the pro version would work. I assume the M2 Berry version would be better as it had a quad core 1GHz processor.

I will look into the other boards you mention as I am unfamiliar with them.

I should probably add that I currently use an old Raspberry pi B, which performs ok but does take time to find music and when I copy new files it can take a very long time. I also have a Pi 3 which is faster at copying music but is still a bit slow. Hence the question

Regards,
Ian

A few notes:
- just because it has a SATA port, does not mean there is a separate controller available that separates your traffic on the SATA port from the rest of the traffic. Best example is the Raspberry Pi where there is one controller for both USB and network. Consequence: bottlenecks when there is high traffic on both USB and network. So, check whether a port has a separate controller or not and whether that will impact your usage case.

- more cores are nice, but not every application makes use of them. Sometimes a dual core with a high frequency is better than a quad core with a low frequency. most SOCs are Arm based so you can check their website to see which architecture is most current and supports what types of operations.

You can also go for a different set up. Most internet routers come with a USB port that you can attach your harddrive to. You'd then use the network port of your board to access the data. The added advantage is that the content of your harddrive are now available on your entire network, not just on your board.

A small (financial) step up would be to look for a cheap NAS device and couple your board to that over the network.

[IDM]

Hi
As I understand it the Banana Pi M2 Berry SATA is not on the same controller as the USB and ethernet (though I may be wrong about this). I therefore decided given the Banana pi M2 Berry was only about £30 on Amazon to give it a go. I am not really slick with Linux but most of the stages were easy.

I used a copy of Raspbian Jessie for the operating system. It then took me a while (due to lack of experience to get the SATA drive correctly EXT4 formatted and mounted. I then had quite some fun and games getting my music backup HDD (which is NTFS formatted) to mount. I ended up having to unmount followed by remount, which worked but I have no idea why. Music files were then copied using Rsync.

Minimserver was loaded using the raspberry pi instructions with no modifications. The software loaded and ran with absolutely no issues.

The whole point for me trying this was that I found the raspberry pi a little slow when moving round the music library and a lag before tracks would start to play. With the banana pi as described there is no issue what so ever, from selection to play it is almost instantaneous. The Rsync to load my entire library was much quicker than the raspberry pi. So in summary if you are thinking of the raspberry pi to work with Minimserver you should also consider one of the banana pi's with SATA.

I am certainly delighted with the outcome and have no plans to change anything as this low power cheap music server solution does everything I could wish for.

Best regards,
Ian