6x 2.5GbE Single Board Computer ODROID H2+ with H2 Net
Вставка
- Опубліковано 23 сер 2024
- STH Main Site Article: www.servetheho...
STH Merch on Teespring: the-sth-merch-...
STH Top 5 Weekly Newsletter: eepurl.com/dryM09
In this review, we take a look at the ODROID H2+ with the H2 Net Card that offers 6x 2.5GbE NICs in a passively cooled x86 platform. We discuss some of the great features as well as some challenges we faced with OSes and the Realtek RTL8125B NICs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Other STH Content Mentioned in this Video
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Project TinyMiniMicro Playlist: • Project TinyMiniMicro
Been a hardkernel customer since my first ODROID-C in 2014. This is one of the best rundowns of all the options and accessories. Kudos on pointing out the eMMC card, power brick and fan.
The latest computer evaluation criteria - can you fight a mountain lion with it :D
I cannot believe the editor left this in. He thought it was funny, added the mountain lion clips. So it stayed :-)
no, but you can bake a fried egg with it 😸
Man i just enjoy your videos with such a positive vibe, you seem to enjoy doing them... keep them coming.
OPNSENSE has added support for the NICs in their upcoming release! Apparently these make great OPNSENSE boxes!
The STH main site review has a OPNsense cameo image that snuck in there.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I see it now! Missed it. Great content as always!
These stuff are just so cool to know about. Love the content STH!
I'm just here for the mountain lion survival tips
Ha! I was laughing when I saw it was in the edit. I thought about removing it myself before uploading but may as well have some fun.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Good call leaving it in. Next time we go to Whitney I'm taking a Lenovo with me, we had a big male shadow us for a couple miles once.
Yup, mountain lion tips... Simply too good to be true
Do not I repeat DO NOT try this on your dog.
@@MackemChops w
Why? My dog has bogomips!
Loving the mini PC and SBC content lately!
Trying to keep a good mix this quarter.
This is awesome ! StH alwasys has the greatest stuff to Review
I still have nightmares from installing Realtek wifi drivers from some dude's github. For whatever reason Realtek does their own thing and doesn't want their drivers in the linux kernel **shrug**
I would love to see those small personal projects. Something to try around the house as we continue to work from home well into 2021...
STH entering the Apple review scene with those Mountain Lion tips /s
Just the other I was thinking about building this!!! Thanks for making this video!!!
I love these weird little machines, but there are always compromises. I think the Seeed Odyssey has 2 Intel Gbit NICs. I expect you could use a PCIe riser adapter to plug an i350 into either. Or just go ITX.
I see a real practical use for this. For some time I have been looking for a device to act as a small, cheap, ceph node. I am working right now with the Pi CM4 and also the Rockpro 64. These nodes should work brilliantly for a couple of OSDs on each node giving you a small but highly available storage solution for not a lot of money.
Yes. Was thinking GlusterFS, but a similar idea.
I love my original H2 working as inexpensive esxi host (esxi 6.5), NIC redundancy is a great feature that you (mostly) cant get on tiny/mini/micro.
The network chip is Realtek, which is not recommended for pfSense/OPNsense. For that, you'll want the Seeed Odyssey.
Realtek out there single handedly selling Intel NICs by not having their own NICs work out of the box on Linux
Lol 😂
This is why I got a board with Intel's V225.
Hey which board did you get that has Intel v225 NICs? I was thinking why haven't they already started making boards with Intel 2.5gbe NICs.
This might be my endgame.
cant wait for the review with pfsense in it. 😁👍💯
Please do a video about setting up a SOHO mini NAS router combination. This would be my use case for this device. Home made Nextcloud / PFSense router combo was my thought.
If only i could get 2x10g and an SFP+ port on this for my ISP i'd use this for my router. But having 6x2.5g sounds interesting, if my ISP supported that speed i might pick something like this up.
What i think this thing would be great for is a file server. Get some sort of sas controller on that PCIe4x slot for 8-16 drives, throw in 32GB of RAM for caching and you've got a nice little 2.5+2.5g server in a very small form factor.
I tried to build a similar concept system using an apecia XQPack2 case, 18 hot swap bays on the front using a 16x2.5 hot swap enclosure from ICDock, and an MATX motherboard.
But this little guy, you could get something SUPER small in a custom chassis, say, something the size of the Xbox series X, with 16x hot swap drives. Super portable, super low power. reletively fast.
You can also use the 2.5Gb speeds within the network, so any transfers between machines are fast. You only really need it if you transfer lots of data internally within your network.
@@vaikjsf34a Edit by between machines i mean handling all the packets, you still mostly need a router for DHCP addresses unless you want to get wild with 169 or static addresses.
Much of the time you shouldnt need a router in between machines within your home unless they're crossing isolated VLANS with two separate switches. I have a 28 port switch with 4x10g ports, and even though my router is only 2.5G(on a 1G switch port) The clients on those 10g ports get full 10g
Kernel versions >5.10 (Fedora, for example) have mainline support for the NICs. Beware of trying to compile the NIC drivers yourself (e.g. on CentOS or RHEL). Sometimes backported kernels break some header stuff that's needed for the compilation (compilation fails on RHEL 8 / CentOS Stream 8).
Just in case anyone using a non-Debian / Ubuntu distro happens to look.
Great point Andrew! That is the challenge of doing point-in-time of support today versus what we will see in the future. I fully expect this to be a non-issue for Linux distributions in the near future. I did want to call-out that one may look at the documentation, see Ubuntu 20.04 support, but then get stuck without a NIC if they did not read carefully.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Not disputing the choice of content in the video at all! I thought it was a great showcase. And I agree with the implication that any sane use-case for this (edge server, firewall running IPFire, PFSense, VMs using Proxmox or similar) will not have a recent enough kernel that the NICs are supported natively.
Unless one is running a "close to bleeding" distro (Fedora, Tumbleweed, Arch), which are typically not used in the kinds of deployments this product might find itself in, mainline Linux kernel NIC support is probably not forthcoming for the next >2 years. (4.14 was released in 2017, see the LTS-type distros mentioned below)
Just thought I would add in the troubles I experienced with the RTL8125B NIC and manual driver compilation in case anyone gets stuck in the same situation (I believe RHEL 8 uses 4.14-stable kernels, which are the same as IPFire). I tried compiling the driver myself for a day or two, and then decided for my application to just go back to Fedora with mainline support.
@@andrewchia7225 AFAIK this NIC is not supported in mainline 5.10.y yet ... not sure which distro adds it but its for example supported in Armbian OOB since ARM based NAS Helios64 comes with the same 2.5G NIC. Also there is a patch for support in its legacy 4.4.y kernel.
In my area we don't really have problem with mountain lions, but we sometimes get boars. How would the cases fare if you're throwing them at a boar?
Both would be ineffective. :-)
Was literally looking at this this morning hahaha.
The add in card is cool.
I wish the ODROID H2+ came with intel NIC's instead of Realtek. I want to use the ODROID H2+ for a pfsense box but have heard horror stories about the Realtek NIC drivers in Linux.
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you.
Wrong CPU and wrong NIC manufacturer. Could you please check WAN to LAN throughput with OPNsense + Sensei with few PCs torrenting behind it?
That would make a pretty hot untangle firewall. I currently use OPNsense but would like to go back to untangle
How about for a small NAS for a one person household (10 Terabytes or so)?
You said that the M.2 port was a PCIe 2.0 but it's written PCIe 1. What's that? A different specification?
so agree with you, skipped the ODROID H2+ because of the casing options
This is still a good price for what you get here in my opinion. Great video.
would be cool if they had different modules for that m.2 slot. they already have the H2 net card which adds another 4 2.5GbE ports but it would be cool if there was also an HBA that adds a bunch of Sata/SFF-8087 ports which an accompanying case that has a bunch of hotswapable drives. A PCIE gen 2 4x slot has a bandwidth of 2GB/s if a single drive reads at, let's say, 160MB/s you could have 12 drives hooked up to it.
*sees title and gets all excited to use one as my Untangle box*
"realtek nics don't work with linux out of the box"
FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
the usaly do... There are more problem with pfsense or opensense if you get a load of 200mbit or more the interrupt get realy high. There is a fix for this. forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-resolve-realtek-nic-stability-issues-on-freebsd-pfsense-2-4-4-2-4-5-2-5-0-opnsense-use-2-5gb-realtek/3555
I just bought one a month ago from an US site before the 4port NIC expansion comes out.
Have some issues with the esxi for torrent traffic from the VM, in which it would make all my VMs in non-responsive staus. I had to re-purpose them as surveillance recording only.
Did you try KVM/ Linux? VMware hardware support is a step behind.
couldnt agree more, the recent release of realtek nic which is being widely used across barebones pc is a complete nightmare as it can be coupled with audio and in most cases require kernel module update. Which makes it even more painful
Looking to use this for a beginner homelab.. Run a couple of small VMs.. Would this be something suitable?
Absolutely
This could make a very very interesting ceph node
It would be interesting to test this network card in some other system with M.2 port.
I was thinking that as well.
the question is what other systems support PCIe bifurcation on their m.2 slot
omg why does it not have 2 more SATAs.. might still get it to make a low power NAS
Any 'made for it' sata port extensions? I wonder how well it would run with KVM and pfsense behind + maybe free NAS.
5W idle and 20W load is perfect for me!
The SoC only has two SATA ports IIRC.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo It does but I wanted 4x haha. I need to find an adapter that will be compatible with it. This is just for a small home server to run my NAS and homeassistant on low power. Possibly plex but I'm not holding my breath
@asdrubale bisanzio Right but it's almost a lottery to find one that works flawlessly.. any recommendations?
Actually I installed Proxmox on it but it is tricky to install Linux on the emmc card.
argument in favor of the acrylic case: in case you are stuck in the mountains and it freezes, the acrylic case will burn much longer , giving you warmth to survive..
What's up with the color grading? It seems off. New camera, haven't created a new grade for it?
Exactly the case. Still changing out some lighting along with the new camera. You will notice that in the B-roll/ photos there is blue on the left and yellow on the right via Nanlite Pavotubes that are doing some edge hightlights. I am thinking of making that standard on the photos/ B-roll. The challenge is that I setup the studio for that look, then decided I did not like the look of those highlights on the talking head, and did not swap back to the old lighting setup.
Any plans to check out the new H4? The only reviews I can find are from not very reputable channels and I'd love to hear your opinion on the new architecture and the fact that both the on-board RJ45s and those on the add-on network board now use Intel i226 NICs.
Great question. I think the challenge is that at $220 for the H4 Ultra, once you add in a chassis, the add-on board, and so forth, it ends up competing with those N305 4-6 port 2.5GbE boxes we have reviewed previously, but at a higher price with more assembly required. It feels like a hard one from a value standpoint.
I've always seen 2.5 and 5G as a money grab. 10G is 20 years old. There are no 2.5G switches, there are no 5G switches, and there (I hope) won't be, and frankly, shouldn't be. New generation of 10G phys are as power efficient as early 1Gs, honestly, enough to be put on laptops.
But that's "Enterprise" stuff, expect 10x price 😆
@@cristian91re GbE was enterprise at some point too, and industry giants openly opposed introducing it to masses. Now it csme to a point in which 15-year old decomissioned enterprise gear has better connectivity than new soho hardware, while old stuff was comparably priced to modern units WHEN IT WAS NEW, not even including inflation. That's outright banditry.
Hey Patrick, very nice video. Can you try installing pfsense on the board? Also can you make a video with a k8s cluster using 2-3 of those boards?
I wish they'd make a slightly more powerful version. I'd love to run multiple VMs on one of these, one being pfsense.
I bought a H2+ to use with FreeNAS but ran into the NIC driver problem so swapped it for a older H2 I had. The H2+ is good with Ubuntu - driver installed using a USB wifi adapter and works on both ports. The H2 runs up FreeNAS and finds the drives on a SATA port multiplier but it's not reliable enough, probably due to the port multiplier and FreeNAS. Before repurposing it I'll try a OMV NAS, when I get a chance to experiment.
I was looking for a 4 port 2.5Gbe NIC but I can only find either 1GB or 10Gb SFP+ NIC. I wanted it for a custom router, this looks perfectly what I need. I heard of ODroid but I never bought one before. I always went with the RasPi of which I have 2 x Raspi 4b and 3 x Raspi 3B
I also wish someone would market a quad NIC to Thunderbolt interface, so I could use NUCs (etc) as routers.
something like this ? www.sonnettech.com/product/echo-3-desktop/overview.html
@@adriansnyman6252 Thanks but unfortunately no. Just a quad NIC in a (cigarette packet sized) box with an emergent USB-C Thunderbolt cable. Not a whole PCIe chassis with a regular quad NIC PCIe card. Too big & costly.
I learned a lot from this, but what the hell was that bit about mountain lions lol?
These are discontinued now, unforunately. I hope they continue and use the Intel Silver N6005 or a J5005 would still be nice.
Have a looked at the H3+? It looks pretty good. what do you think
Hi Serve the home team,
Sorry for the dummy question, I got a little confused. Is it possible to use this machine as a firewall (pfsence) in a home environment? Does the low CPU can compromise internet performance? Im planing to implement a small and low energy consumption environment using proxmox, kubernetis and home assistant. Your videos are giving me great ideas. Thank you for your content.
It somewhat depends on how fast your WAN connection is, and how aggressive you want your firewall to be. For simple NAT, it will be fine. For major packet inspection or features like running IPsec/ OpenVPN tunnels, it can be a limit.
Next Video: how-to to turn the Odroid H2 Plus into an enterprise router!
I was actually hoping that's what this video was going to be about based on the thumbnail
Is it possible to combiner two such Odroids to use them as a combined 8-port switch / router device? I'd like to span a computing cluster this way.
Color grading issue? Seems grayer / less contrasty / black isn't dark enough.
Yes. 100%. New camera and lighting is still getting broken into the workflow.
The supply chain shortages have destroyed availability of these boards for over a year now. I'm looking at the ROCKPro64 which *is* available right now, has a PCIe 4x expansion slot available, and I'm wondering if there are any 10Gbe adapters that will work with it.
I kinda want to see that NIC working on a RBPI now
Paging Jeff Geerling! :)
I was looking for this device to use as a router for my pppoe 1gb connection.
I'm not insisting on pfsense, but I do need reliable network that support heavy workload , be it multiple vms or people downloading legal torrents.
What sub 200 dollars device could one use besides the usual hp t730 or 630 plus. ?
The 730 & 630s don't have an option for PCIE expansion like T620plus :(
Can't get the H2+ anymore due to chip shortages.
I set as my standard last year to get any new computers with 16Gb of RAM as a minimum.
Interesting 👍 thanks.
Would have preferred an ARM cpu in this setup.
Bummer Realtek even if 2.5 GbE.
OS X Mountain Lion (2012) still giving nightmares . . . (20:06)
Kindest regards.
P.s. As of late 2022, N5105 'router' boxes make Odroid H2+ look obsolete.
WRT >1GbE APs do common GbE capable POE(+) injectors work with these >1GbE ports?
Correction: The J4115 is a Celeron, and not an Atom CPU.
Goldmont Plus, the architecture behind Gemini Lake (Refresh) is an Atom architecture. The branding is a Celeron J4115. When you are accustomed to discussing all three sometimes they get mixed up.
C200 not being used much anymore? Just for eyecandy?
A good way to memorialize the switch to the C70 in videos. The C70 workflow is much faster (funky colors on this video aside.) There are still great bits for the C200, but for now the C70 is the better option.
Perfect for clearos or ipfire
Thanks for this. I wonder is there a good 4 port Intel nic card for pcie not just NVME. I have a Asus-E35M1-I-DELUXE that I want to install PFSense on. I would like a horizontal riser card for it too. If not I do have it in a mini-itx cube case. But I also have a 2U mini-itx case that has a built in power supply. I am so ready to upgrade my current setup.
Quad port 1Gbit: Intel i350-t4 is a short half-high PCIe card that's easy to find and inexpensive. ($150 approx)
I was really hoping they would be intel based NICs
That's bonkers. 6x 2.5Gbit connections is going to cripple it. What exactly is the purpose / use? I generally say 2.5Gbit on a motherboard is worthless because there are no cheap switches for 'home' use, but I guess you could use this as the switch - I can see any other use case.
It's 6x 2.5. Not everyone lives in USA cave with slow internet. SGP, JP, SW & East EU countries have affordable 2gbps & 10gbps internet.
@@therealb888 he wasn't talking about that.... 2.5GBase-T switches aren't cheap yet and are not that common, that's what he was critiquing.... And ai live in the US and have 1200 Mbps internet (1.2Gbps)
There is a relatively "cheap" 5-port 2.5GBit Switch available: QNAP QSW-1100/1105-ST Desktop 2.5G Switch
Be interesting if there were a hba card that fit in the NGFF-2280 slot. Run a Linux system with something like snapraid and mergerfs.
You can get M.2 SATA adapters fairly easily.
This setup was made for OpenWRT
Could you use this to make a switch and how difficult would that be, what OS would you run?
You could, but it would likely perform poorly so I would strongly advise against it.
I have been using this as router / firewall for past few months with OPNSense. (realtek drivers included by default) After reading comments from various places with theoretical references that it will perform poorly for switching I have been quiet surprised with performance. I have no problems switching 200Mb+ sec transfers through the 2.5 gigabit ports whist concurrently keeping latency low for gaming (ie less than 1ms sec through the device whilst it is loaded this way at around 20% cpu consumption).
Yeah, this H2+ series got obsolete faster than light turns on after you press the switch.
It is seriously bad how fast this was taken off the market, I wonder if them likes of Cisco, Netgear etc didn't like what a device like this brought to the table. Honestly it's absolutely criminal that this has been discontinued and no similar or improved replacements have shown up to take it's place.
Crap.
I think it was mostly because of the semiconductor shortage, at least that's the official narrative. If they could manufacture enough of these things then they'd own the DIY firewall/router market, IMO. I just want the network card if it's supported by any other SBC or even x86/64
Hmmm pfsense router..?
👎 for intel, 👍 for good setup board with good IO, good good lan and even couple of satas (hope the added nic board has POE option or is convertable would be another 👍).
So overall no like nor dislike for the vid aka. the hardware.
"...Realtek NICs"
pfSense has left the chat.
I was excited until Realtek was mentioned. Probably missing something, but until Realtek get serious, the main selling point of this board is flawed.
physics processor? mpeg2 video encoder?
Why amd no such low power cpu ?
Works fine with pfsense
does the NIC's support TSN?
I've got pfsense running on the realtek nics, but I didnt do anything special... just installed and ran with it.
You are lucky then. I tried that and kept getting watchdog errors and needed to reboot it every few days. I eventually replaced the box I had it on with something with intel NICs and have not experienced that problem since.
@@saiyantwan I must be... I only have a 500mb WAN connection, and disabled TCP offload during setup. I'd also gone with the 2.5 nightly build, just making sure I had the latest fixes from the dev release, and those change enough that who knows if it's actually fixed or re-broken at this point in later builds.
Either way though, I couldn't be happier - suricata and snort, pfblockerng, freeradius, DDNS, acme, and bind, all running in one tiny little box averaging 7-9 watts? Un-freakin-believable. (Got the m90n-IoT planning to make it a dedicated plex transcoding host thanks to the igpu, but after testing it for pfsense, the plan changed lol)
It's effectively the cheapest managed 2.5Gbase-t switch.
I'm quiet sure he's talking about OS X 10.8.
if this had more sata ports i would be sold. id want at least 4.
@asdrubale bisanzio by the end of the video I realized that. However it would be best if their was a slot for nvme as well as sata ports or a second nvme port that could take a sas adapter. It would honestly make one of the best sff high speed nas around that doesnt cost many thousands of dollars before drives. As pcie gen4/5 come to sbc this should totally be possible. And they should also be able to add 10gbe or even 40gbe Ethernet to a sbc with gen4 or 5. Throw in tb4 or usb4 and you have the perfect solution.
Hav3 been waitning and wantig this setup for long time, hard 5o find..
Dealbraker is Intel cpu..
Isn’t this the perfect gateway/firewall combo
Nop. It does everything in software. Check their graphs, with load to the NICs the CPU usage also goes over the roof. Regular routers do a lot of work in hardware.
Yay, tons of network ports so I can support 500M people seeing my apache start page! Bazinga.
Why not make an M.2 raid card with SAS SFF cables to interface with a SATA backplane?!? No? Still gonna use a mini ITX and not buy this.
i just want a cheap sbc with all the features. 5/10gbe ethernet, wifi6, thunderbolt 4, usb 4, gen4 nvme, and pretty.
Who doesn't lol
@asdrubale bisanzio particularly soggy fries with a good crisp to the outside, and a side of ketchup that isn’t cold. Is this really too much to ask for?
These cards are FULLY compatible with Linux and *BSD.
The problem is the buggy outdated drivers that come in the OS!
Compile the latest yourself or go find them.
Just wondering how much Lenovo pays you for you constantly referring to it? The video where you used it as a stand was kinda funny, but by now it's getting a little much... Otherwise great content as usual!
Zero. Just did a bunch of videos basically at the same time. Trying to batch stuff up to see if that helps streamline production
Please review NanoPi M4V2 with a sata adapter against this!!
But can it game?
This makes me kind of sad... These things are out of stock everywhere because of the stupid chip shortage...
These days I somewhat prefer those J4125 Mini PCs like the one we reviewed a few weeks ago. Having a nicer chassis is very useful
@@ServeTheHomeVideo the mini PCs aren't as conducive to a tidy little NAS though... I've been trying to figure out something to replace google and this seemed like an excellent option on the cheap until all of the new hardware is released at the end of this year.
ahh yes. the tried and true measure of usefulness in a mountain lion attack! LMAO
Not having Intel NIC's, another missed opportunity....
Intel nics cost $5, RTL costs $2
@@therealb888 I understand realtek is cheaper, nowever im sure the cost could easily be added to the final cost and people would pay it. I would assume these boards are specialized board for a particular audience, not for your average user. Your specialized audience would gladly pay for intel nics.
Hmm, no good as cougar repellant....good to know...
Awesome
These have been discontinued
20:33 I do not agree, if you throw something like this into a lion He would die of laughter that you want to stop him with something like this, and thanks to that you would survive 😜