Hi SNOs,
Any of you uses ROCKPro64 SBC and can share your experience with using it as storage node?
I plan to buy it with nice cheap 50$ metal case and included Dual SATA-II controller with hope it will be better than for example “fake” USB-to-SATA like in Odroid HC2. Here are my questions…
Will default 12V/5A power supply be sufficient for 2x Ironwolf drives?
Which OS do you use? What about stability?
Thanks in advance!
I do not have a RockPro64, but I am running on a Rock64 so maybe my experience can help you decide.
For OS I am I currently using ayufan’s Debian Stretch image, but I will soon be switching to Armbian/Debian Buster. Based on my research I would recommend trying that as it is maintained regularly. My Rock64 has been very stable, although I would highly recommend running the OS from an eMMC module and not an SD card. I use a 16 GB module.
For power, you might be cutting it a bit close. This post on the pine64 forums suggests the board consumes 0.65 A (@12V) at full load. The peak current pulled by the Ironwolfs at start-up is 1.8 A (@12V). Plus some consumption by the SATA board (no specs found), lets assume 0.3A.
RockPro = 0.65 A
Drives = 3.6 A
SATA = 0.3 A
----------------
Total = 4.95 A
So you would really be pushing the limits of what the power supply can provide. Granted, this is absolute peak current draw at startup, and after that your consumption per drive is about 0.75 A. This would reduce the current requirement to 2.85 A. So it would probably work, however if it was me I wouldn’t cut it so close. I would probably put the RockPro on a 3 A power supply, and power the drives independently.
Hope this helps!
one could ofc just use a bigger power supply…
usually any stable 12 volt will do and amps well you just want more than you need… imo a good deal more…
75% i would consider max load for most things… it make stuff not break… and then if you want some room for expansion later… maybe an old laptop power brick would do nicely those are usually stable 12 volt and got lots of juice and power saving features…
and like baker says… pull as low power through the board as you can… i would try to avoid multiple power bricks if you are trying to do an low wattage build…
tho personally i would prefer building more akin to this…
sure the low wattage setup is nice… but most have either spare old hardware they can get their hands on for cheap or has somewhere…
when building like this one isn’t bound by the very limited expansion options of a RPI like device and you can upgrade it and even use it as a small server for loads of different things…
in this particular case i believe the cpu can be replaced with a much more powerful one, but the athlon 200 was chosen for low power usage… and ofc one can add ram and pcie cards and get up to 10-12 or more sata ports… or whatever one decides to go with… and ofc it will have m.2 slots, sure it’s a bit more expensive ofc… but it should be a viable platform for years to come…
Thank you for replies and advices!
My new node is up and running, RockPro64 + pcie sata controller + 1 Ironwolf 8TB (for now, I’ll add 2nd drive when storage gets full of data) in nice metal case 
Only problems I had was sata controller didn’t want to work. After clearing board pins and putting and removing it from pcie slot few times it started to work (lol). I used latest Ambrian Focal on eMMC card.
Also there was no HDMI output at all after install (but OS was running, ssh worked) - solution was removing blacklisted modules. I never had such software problems with Odroid boards, maybe it says something about software maturity…
After finally finishing setup no problems at all. I hope that will help someone