Comment on The "Everything" Fanless Home Server for under $300 USD

TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What arm board :p
  Honest question. All the ones I have seen are really awful and I would love to tinker with something that has real pcie (Ampere workstations do not count)

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  • TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Both the ROCKPro64 and the NanoPi M4 from 2018 has a x4 PCIe 2.1 interface. Same goes for almost all RK3399 boards that care to expose the PCIe interface.

    This boards seems extremely poorly designed, have a look at the CPU specs: www.intel.com/content/www/…/specifications.html

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    They could’ve exposed more SATA ports and / or PCI lanes and didn’t do it.

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    • stalfoss@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      PCIe 2 x4 is the same speed as PCIe 3 x2, no?

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      • TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Generally, there’s a small difference in speeds:

        PCIe 2.0 x 4 > 2.000 GB/s PCIe 3.0 x 2 > 1.969 GB/s

        But we also have to consider the suggested ARM CPU does PCIe 2.1 and we’ve to add the this detail:

        PCIe 2.1 provides higher performance than the PCIe 2.0 by facilitating a transparent upgrade from a 32-bit data path to a 64-bit data path at 33MHZ and 66MHz.

        I shouldn’t also have a large impact but maybe we should think about it a bit more.

        Anyways I do believe this really depends on your use case, if you plan to bifurcate it or not and what devices you’re going to have on the other end. For instance for a NAS I would prefer the PCIe 2.1 x 4 as you could have more SATA controllers with their own lanes instead of sharing lanes in PCIe 3.0 using a MUX.

        Conclusion: your mileage may vary depending on use case. But I was expecting to have more PCI lanes exposed be it via more m.2 slots or other solution.

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