Best cheap hardware to run Nextcloud on?

I agree that the extra CPU performance might not justify the (likely) extra price, but having more or less all software work out of the box (for example OnlyOffice runs only on x86) and not having to worry if there will be a custom kernel release for your favorite distro is worth quite a bit. Also this allows much more RAM and much more& faster storage with the connection options. Of course all that comes at a price, but at this embedded level intel seems to run a much tighter margin than elsewhere (according to Hardkernel the Intel CPU was the more cost efficient option at least compared to AMD).

Hello nachoparker, would you please help me generating an image for rockpro64? Thank you. George

sure, learn to generate Armbian images, and the rest is pretty easy :wink:

I can generate rockpro64 images if there is demand for it, and I get people to test them each release.

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Benchmarks of that new x86 Odroid:
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-ODROID-H2-Benchmarks
Cost seems to be $111 (not including RAM).

Iā€™m interested in rockpro64 images as well. Would gladly help you to test them

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XU4 (Cloudshell2 and HC2) work solid with NextcloudPi! and were $55 for the systems - not including the HDD and the cases. Best of all is that Nacho provides easy to use docker and burnable images to just start with. And I have scripts that process all JPGs, (images of any type) into PDFs and then OCR them for better search processing. Imagemagick and ocrmypdf works fine with 8 cores.

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@minnix @George_CRD it seems like thereā€™s preliminary support now

https://www.armbian.com/rockpro64/

Are you guys still interested?

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@nachoparker, Yes I am!

Just ordered a new RockPro64 and the NAS case. I ordered directly form Pine64 and itā€™s getting shipped from China so itā€™ll be a while getting here. I figure I wonā€™t have all the parts for about 3 or 4 weeks. Iā€™ll let you know when it all comes in so you can build an image.

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Here it is

https://ownyourbits.com/downloads/testing/NextCloudPi_RockPro64_02-11-19/

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Yay. :slight_smile:

Iā€™m starting to warm up to Pine64 a bit more (as a company to trust), as they seem to be reaching out to the Linux community more.

Theyā€™ve made several recent gestures of goodwill in various forums (and they were at this yearā€™s FOSDEM), which have impressed me. Of course, time will tell what they actually deliver, and not just promise. They seem genuinely interested in listening to the needs of Linux users like us.

I think they see how crucially important that community support is to the Raspberry Pi, so they want to similarly build a community if they can.

Dear Pine64, if youā€™re out there listening, I beseech you to make upstream contributions to the Linux mainline kernel, to make all your boards work silky smooth in distros like Armbian. Thatā€™ll get the Linux geeks running in droves to your boards.

Iā€™m not asking for more difficult things like hardware accelerated graphics in a Desktop environment. Just any and all drivers that a headless Nextcloud server would want to use, especially related to Storage I/O, Network I/O, CPU throttling, temperature sensors, etc. You know, server stuff.

For example, hereā€™s one such nasty bug, currently. And hereā€™s another.

Hello @nachoparker, @Jeffery_Frederick, @minnix, @George_CRD, and others who find the RockPro64 interesting,
Thereā€™s a dedicated thread about running Nextcloud on the RockPro64 over on the Pine64 forum. By posting your experiences there, you might attract advice, etc. from that community.

I think itā€™s also worth noting that the Rock64 is officially ā€œSupportedā€ by Armbian, but the RockPro64 is one step down from that, called ā€œSuitable For Testing (Work In Progress)ā€.

The Rock64 only quite recently graduated from ā€œSuitable For Testing (Work In Progress)ā€ to ā€œSupportedā€. These designations act as quite a reliable vetting, IMHO. Iā€™m a bit more conservative than most, and try to stick to the ā€œSupportedā€ ARM boards.

Yep, Iā€™m aware of that thread. I will update once Iā€™ve gotten my RockPro64 and testing NCP with it.

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Armbian is working on full support for the RockPro64. It just takes timeā€¦

I used Armbian on my Rock64 before it graduated to ā€œSupportedā€ and it worked fine. I plan on doing the same with the RockPro64. Iā€™ll also be sending feedback and any troubleshooting needed to assist the Armbian team as needed to move the RockPro64 to ā€œSupportedā€ status.

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Awesome, @Jeffery_Frederick.

Good news. WRT the nasty PCIe bug (for the RockPro64) I linked to above, there is active kernel development by a user on the Pine64 forum called ā€˜Mrfixit2001ā€™, and heā€™s stated he will push his kernel fixes back upstream into github.

Yay, Mrfixit2001, I say. :grinning:

Without rock-solid PCIe support, then the RockPro64 isnā€™t really any more compelling than a cheaper Rock64, IMHO, since in both cases, USB 3 is (currently) all youā€™ve got to attach some faster bulk storage to (for use with Nextcloud).

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@nachoparker, I got all my parts for the RockPro64 and should have some time this weekend to put it all together. Iā€™ll give your image a try and let you know how it goes.

Some questions in the meantime.

I guess Iā€™ll have to manually edit the fstab file to set up the two hard drives connect to the SATA card, right? The NCP apps donā€™t support SATA drives yet, correct?

Thoughts on what filesystem to create? Iā€™ll have two 8TB drives attached. Probably not going to set up a Raid system, but just use something like Rsync to ā€œbackupā€ the data drive to the second disk.

Can I use the built in NCP tools for doing backups, or will I have to roll my own?

Thanks!

NCP supports SATA, yes.

I just uploaded another rockpro image two days ago

I always recommend BTRFS, if you use the wizard or ncp tools to format USB thatā€™s the default.

Of course, this is a 100% functional NextCloudPi instance :smiley:

Sorry, not clear with my question. What I meant to ask was do the native tools (Formatting disks, configuring and managing backups, etc) support SATA drives, or should I have to do those tasks on my own.

I do know that I can use a SATA drive with NCP as I have a Popcorn Hour Transformer setup as my main NCP server now.

Iā€™ll download the new image before I set up my RockPro64.

Thanks!

Yes, SATA is fully supported :+1:

Motherboard: Supermicro X8DT3
CPU: 2 x IntelĀ® XeonĀ® CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz
Memory: 16 GB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns) ECC
Controllercard: MegaRaid SAS/SATA

all that for less than 200$ and its damn fast secure klick link for images.

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