I thought I’d share my finished project using the BPI-R2 here. I built a tiny NAS/router inside a hot-swap hard drive cage. The dimensions of the BPI-R2 were excellent for this size, it’s basically the size of a 3.5" hard drive and all the I/O ports are on the same edge. Luckily I could position the SD card at the front and it is still accessible.
SATA and network speeds are perfectly fine for a non-SSD NAS. The 300MB/s limit would be a problem for connecting two SSDs though. The CPU is fast enough as a NAS but is a little slow if I want to run other things on it too. I’ll consider an aarch64 board next time, otherwise I may switch to x86_64 boards if I need speed. More RAM and a 64-bit OS are preferred for ZFS, but it I actually got it running on the BPI-R2 anyway (I did have to manually give the kernel more RAM with vmalloc=496M during boot).
It wasn’t possible to connect an internal power supply so I had to solder the power lines to the pins of the barrel plug. That worked fine, but was kind of weird.
It’s wonderfull
I was trying the same thing from my side, but I was more interested about the software layer.
What Kernel version are you running ?
How do you build ZFS ? (native, fuse etc…)
I’m yet using ZFS from my side, compil it was not easy.
It’s running slowly but it works: using snapshot dedup and FS compression.
Native ZFS. I built zfsonlinux from source following these instructions for kmods. Compression is probably okay as long as you’re not using gzip, it can be very slow. Deduplication is likely a bad idea with only 2GB RAM, it needs lots more.
I manually tuned vmalloc by trial and error. That was needed because the kernel doesn’t always have much RAM allocated for itself on 32-bit devices. I was seeing slow 10MB/s write speeds that went up to 60MB/s after tweaking it.
Also, I have gotten read speeds up to 108MB/s over SMB on large files (ZFS can read from both drives of a mirror at once).
You probably cut that acrylic on a laser cutter? Would you mind sharing the details (measures, draws)? I want to build a 3d printed case for my Bpi-R2.
The diagrams are in the article on my website including the PDF outlines used for laser cutting. The outlines weren’t quite perfect, I did have to remove the thin piece of plastic between the WAN and LAN ports.
I did the front panel by hand though. Just cut out the SD card slot with a router.
I found it really easy to get outlines of the ports by just tracing an image of them from a flatbed scanner.
