Cubieboard3/cubietruck as NAS

[chrwei]

since cubietruck has a sata port and 1Gbps nic, I'm thinking of using one to build a NAS to replace my aging Marvell based one.  I'm not concerned with the software side, I've done plenty of samba installs before, and I'm familiar with kernel tweaking to eek out some extra performance.

hardware-wise, what kind of performance can I expect from the gigE nic and the sata?  I'm currently getting ~30MB/s with large file copies over samba, is that, or more, a reasonable expectation?  30MB/s is enough for me, but he Marvell's 128MB ram is really limiting me.

also, I have a thecus esata raid cabinet that i would use with it, it handles raid1 itself and presents as a single SATA disk to any OS, it is not a port multiplier, and I have used it with a sata to esata cable on various PCs without issue.  I'm assuming this will work with the A20's sata, is there any reason it would not? 

[chrwei]

ok, but what kind speeds from a client PC over gigabit?

[Roman Mamedov]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:32:08 -0700 (PDT)
István Bakró Nagy <bakro....@gmail.com> wrote:

> CB2 has only 100Mbit ethernet.
>
> my PC and my router is on gigabit speed. i can max out the the bandwith
> with no problem. (without any overclock).
>
> 8~9 Mbit down ~5 Mbit up at the same time.

...that's not "maxing out" 100 Mbit.

--
With respect,
Roman

[Chris Weiss]

yes that's maxing out 100Mbit, which is actually not hard to do at
all. I'm interested in how far it gets on gigabit while doing disk IO
and samba's cpu work at the same time.

[Chris Weiss]

> your question about the gigabit .. is ignored

correct.

so far all I've been able to discern is that the sata driver works
well (hdparm getting good speeds) and that the gigabit is limited to
around half speed due to architectural issues, and both these
independently are fine. I have yet to see any real world or even
proper benchmark results on gigabit. hdparm and iperf are not
benchmarks, they can only test the ideal situation and say nothing
about actual workload performance.

[Bastiaan van den Berg]

​For storage related benchmarking, i like bonnie++. 

You could nfs-mount it and then do bonnie++ on that, to test both network and storage performance.

--

buZz

[Jorge]

I'm not sure if those values will suit you, as neither my machine nor the cubietruck were idle, both were doing other things, so this numbers should be taken as a minimum. Notably cubietruck was also doing reads and writes in the same filesystem:

Overview:

My desktop a 8 core amd64 32Gb ram

cubietruck with a 3.5" 1.5Tb SAMSUNG HD154UI ext4 formatted (echo performance >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor)

both connected to a gigabit switch (desktop <-> GB switch <-> GB switch <-> cubietruck), NO jumbo frames allowed, as some old media player in the network hangs itself just by thinking about them.

cubietruck samba 3.6.23 share mounted at my desktop in /mnt/cubietruck, basic samba setup, if there are parameters that speedup samba I haven't used them, just basic user security sharing a directory.

First test ddrescue with synchronous writes to try to approach real speed of a 1.5Gb file:

ddrescue --synchronous thumbnails-digikam.sql.bz2 /mnt/cubietruck/thumbnails-digikam.sql.bz2

GNU ddrescue 1.16

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt

rescued:     1518 MB,  errsize:       0 B,  current rate:    9474 kB/s

   ipos:     1518 MB,   errors:       0,    average rate:   15817 kB/s

   opos:     1518 MB,     time since last successful read:       0 s

Finished        

Second test a regular copy + sync to flush the data:

$ time (cp thumbnails-digikam.sql.bz2 /mnt/cubietruck/thumbnails-digikam.sql.bz2 ; sync)

real    0m57.802s (~26MB/s)

And finally a bonnie++ and as it was suggesting me a file double the ram (64Gb) I lied:

$ bonnie++ -d /mnt/cubietruck/bonnie -s 3072 -u nobody -r 1024 -m cubietruck

Using uid:65534, gid:65534.

Writing a byte at a time...done

Writing intelligently...done

Rewriting...done

Reading a byte at a time...done

Reading intelligently...done

start 'em...done...done...done...done...done...

Create files in sequential order...done.

Stat files in sequential order...done.

Delete files in sequential order...done.

Create files in random order...done.

Stat files in random order...done.

Delete files in random order...done.

Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-

Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--

Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP

cubietruck       3G   162  99 22077   7 11011   3   357  99 33280   4 158.4   8

Latency             57213us     157ms    1761ms   45032us     336ms     325ms

Version  1.96       ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------

cubietruck          -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--

              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP

                 16    31   0 12970  10   280   3    32   0   926   7   243   5

Latency               295ms   14649us     233ms     525ms   13469us     720ms

Don't know if those are of any use to you, if you need more performance perhaps an Intel powered board like the MinnowBoard MAX will suit better to you.

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Jorge Nerín
<jne...@gmail.com>

[Chris Weiss]

that's good stuff
not bad for untuned and non-idle system