Hi there,
On Fri, 8 Jan 2021, backu...@kosowsky.org wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote at about 14:19:03 -0600 on Thursday, January 7, 2021:
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:57 PM Guillermo Rozas <guille2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Interesting... how does Banana Pi Pro compare to Pi4? e.g.,
> >> performance, interfaces/ports, price, support...
> >
> >
> > I would say it's inferior in every aspect, except for the direct SATA
connector (I think it's roughly equivalent to a Pi2 or Pi3 in raw specifications). If
it wasn't for the reports about the Pi4 overheating / needing an active cooler I
would switch to a Pi4.
>
> There are several fanless cases that act as a huge heat sink. I like
> the flirc aluminum one but there are others and you can find some
> YouTube demonstrations/reviews of them.
>
So is the issue purely an "overheating" and adequate "heat sinking" or
is there a more fundamental issue with the hardware design ...
In my (expert) opinion it's fundamental to the design. It's well
known that the USB design was flawed when it was first brought out.
It was widely publicized that the incorrect use of a single 'pull-up'
resistor violated the USB spec (two resistors were required, and I
believe that later versions were updated to have two resistors).
The fact that a mistake like that could get into production makes me
wonder what else is wrong.
Although I have no hard evidence to offer, the behaviours I've seen
lead me to suspect that something else in the design is at the very
least marginal. Obvious candidates are power conditioning and the USB
circuits but it could be something completely different and it could
be more than one thing. At one time I had the idea of using the 4B in
a product but I abandoned the idea. If I were going to use the 4B I'd
be finding out exactly what the problems are before I'd commit to it.
i.e., if I can keep the heat down, will it be stable?
Not if your definition of stable is anything like mine, and your Pi4Bs
behave anything like the several I've used. See my previous posts.
I strongly recommend that the 4B is not used for anything as important
as your backups. In my experience the 3B+ is fine. I've been using
one for backups for more than a year, and one as a database and file
server for quite a bit longer than that, with no issues although the
database server does I admit occasionally creak a bit. It's only ever
fallen over when the OOM killer killed something that I shouldn't have
let it kill (rpc.mountd!) and having written the appropriate values to
/proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj it now trundles along quite unflappably. In
any case, a 3B+ is well up to it, the extra power of the 4B won't be
needed unless your backups are extraordinary.
--
73,
Ged.
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