You read the title. I like doing stupid things because I like trying out random hardware that’s entirely too expensive.
My question is this: Does anyone in this forum have a Radxa Orion O6? If you do, do you also have a Sonnet McFiver PCIE x8 card?
I think it would be very cool but extremely dumb to make a raid 1 nas server using these two things, but I also really want to see it.
If you’re not aware of these pieces of hardware, I can direct you towards Jeff Geerling’s recent video on the sorry state of the Orion O6 here
as well as Sonnet’s webpage for the McFiver here
TL;DR has anyone tried out this extremely niche hardware setup of a 12 core mini ITX ARM board and pcie x8 10gbe nic with integrated dual m.2 2280 slots?
Also just if anyone has any thoughts do you also think this would be cool as a project or is it not worth it?
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If your aim is to save power or leverage an efficient processor, then x86 will be a better choice.
An x86 CPU in the same class of performance like a N305 will use ~½ the power of the ARM CPU in question… despite what people say, ARM isn’t some power efficiency silver bullet; the only ARM CPU’s that are outclassing comparable x86 CPUs in power efficiency are the Apple chips (which have a decent node advantage).
Nvidia, Amazon and Ampere all dumped insane amounts of money into making beefy ARM CPUs and came up lacking in performance and power efficiency compared to the best x86 has to offer.
Oh for sure. I don’t intend on it being an efficient machine, the Jeff Geerling video mentions that its idling at 26w of power draw for no reason. More just a question of whether its worth investing the effort and money into getting something like that working. I think that it would be fun and interesting, and I want to see more lower end ARM ATX/ITX boards.
However if someone made a case about that particular ecosystem not being worth investing in, at least right now, I’m all ears.
This isn’t exactly a strong reason (especially if you want to contribute to the codebase), but in general the software available will be less mature or missing for the platform compared to x86 repos.
Other than that, if you have the interest there shouldn’t be anything stopping you.
There’s a section about it in the Jeff Geerling video I linked in my original post. I’d recommend checking it out. Looks like its still in a pretty buggy state for now but since it supports UEFI/BIOS boot you should be able to run WinARM or any version of linux that has an aarch64 package. Personally, if I ever get one I’ll be looking forward to getting Fedora running on it.
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As much as the Radxa O6 still seems like a beta it’s the most enticing ARM board I’ve seen yet (subject to constraints of an experiments budget). I wish the RAM had been socketed. It’s so close.
Being an answer seeking a question though brings sets of possibilties, maybe none of which it’s best at.
The sonnet card is really interesting but blocks from adding a GPU/video /llm accelerator, possibly the most obvious other card to consider finding something to use it with.
At x8 on the sonnet card I’d guess if you contend the network link, and nvme or usb-c at once, it’ll bottleneck on the PCI-E bus itself even at Gen 4, so may not bring a lot over the inbuilt net ports.
Maybe the builtin 5Gbit, and maybe with a 4x m.2 pci-e card, that is at least, more of a storage server. And you still have 2 M.2 slots for SFP+, SATA port sticks, and internal USB headers.
But there seem to be a lot cheaper ways to put a couple flash drives on network.
Also without appliance type platforms (e.g. truenas, pfsense) you’ll also maybe have to be prepared for freestyle sysadm (such as fedora, you note). That’s not a limitation by any means, and maybe cockpit would tick enough web admin boxes.
Though the board itself doesn’t offer a lot of RAM (ok there’s a 64G one, that’s out of my experiments budget) particularly for some containerised/VM services that might want to run with a fileserver.
Alright so let me pose an even crazier scenario. Are you familiar with Oculink eGPU docks?
Radxa O6 + Sonnet. the radxa boots off of a usb in some super lightweight linux OS like alpine. Sonnet gets dual m.2s, the m.2 slot native to the board gets an m.2 > oculink adapter. Connect oculink eGPU dock.
Profit(?) with a terribly mismanaged set of hardware.