Basic specs:
$15 Mini ITX conversion kit available.
$139 Plus and $220 Ultra model = 4 sata ports
Single channel of DDR5 memory supported.
2.5gbe. two ports on Ultra.
Ultra jumps from 4 to 8 cores, improved GPU.
Thinking this could make a nice backup box to share with family. Thoughts?
I considered an ODROID when building my homelab storage, but ended up going with a full tower instead and doing compute and storage on the same box.
If this is truly a backup box to be shared with a couple users - doesn’t need much if any compute, does it? Cheaper ODROID, save the $$ for more storage capacity / redundancy.
I’ll share my experience and thoughts. First, know I’m a huge fan of ZFS and use it wherever I can. I have a small server consisting of two 8TB HDDs configured as a ZFS mirror attached to a Pi 4B via USB. I’m not fond of USB connected storage but it has been solid for over two years, including migrating from 6TB HDDs to 8TB HDDs.
These ARM based SBCs seem to have plenty of horsepower for this kind of application. Of course that depends on the application. It’s not going to be good at something like transcoding videos. For that, you want an Intel processor that supports Quick Sync.
Having PCIe for storage is (IMO) fantastic. I get that from the Pi 5 and CM4 though I have not leveraged that for my Pi based server. It’s secondary to my main server and as long as it keeps working, there are other things higher on my priority list.
I see that the only Linux disto that Odroid supports is Ubuntu and the most recent is 22.04. There are probably third party options. One of the things that keeps coming up comparing Raspberry Pis to similar boards is S/W support and breadth of the community. That’s the only potential drawback I see with the Odroid boards. OTOH I know that Chris Fischer (Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts) has one and is really happy with it. I have no direct experience.
If you go that way, let us know how you like it,
The Odroid H4 line is x86, not ARM, so you can run whatever distro you like on it. it’s an Intel N97 processor in most models.
Also OP, get out of my head, I was just looking at these yesterday.
It seems particularly nice if you get the $15 Mini-ITX adapter so you can stick it in a standard PC case.
The N-305 on the odroid ultra actually does have QuickSync - it’s a pretty nice looking board. No personal experience with one, though.
I have this as well.
Honestly, any old enterprise thin client is a superior option for pci-e at a much lower price. Cancelled my Pi5 + nvme orders for this reason.
This is totally false.
I’ve used all of these without issue on Odroid arm since 2017. Cannot speak for non-Debian based, but probably many more.
There is no functional difference between Odroid and Pi arm devices since they support effectively all the same gpio hats. Odroid has plenty of support and functionality, plus is always ahead of the Pi line, because they iterate much faster. Example, they offered arm64 software back in 2017 while Pi didn’t offer it officially until 2022.
Sorry for the off-topic, but want to clarify odroid devices are well supported.
My mistake. That changes everything as my understanding is that ARM devices frequently require very specific support to boot and work whereas x86 devices only require specific support for corner cases and non standard peripherals.
The only distro I see for download links is Ubuntu 22.04 https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/start There is a comment “… or download a free operating system such as Debian or Ubuntu.” but no further mention of Debian.
Edit: Favorable review of the Odroid H4 on the Self Hosted podcast. https://selfhosted.show/138
Great choice for a budget NAS. Just don’t expect it to do more than being a NAS–this will not be a good fit for transcoding or other compute-heavy workloads.
I have a D-1541 128gb rdim ecc, w/ 2vdev 6x14tb Raidz2 2x 800gb S3710 mirror (vm/apps) 2x1tb Samsung 870 Evo mirror (vm/apps), Then I have an additional 2x 1.92tb PM983 mirrored for extra pools for my proxmox cluster. lastly, 2x 1.92 tb PM983(overprovisioned by a massive amount) are SLOG and I have a Optane 4801x U.2 as L2arc. finally i have 2x wd red nvme 500gb running on my pcie 3.0 x 1 m.2 pair that are a meta pool.
I have 2 on board 10gbE both are LACP on aa managed l3 switch that has more 10gb interface for my 3x proxmox cluster, 1x m90q gen3 i9-12900 (my pc running debian w 96gb ram and proxmox in background)500gb samsung evo bootdrive 2x 2tb Firecuda 530R nvme , and 2x m90qgen2 i7-11700T 32gb ram and using old bx550 boot drive and cheap nvme atm striped but majority storage is hosted from tn scale
I am getting this H4 setup so I have a solid backup for truenas. I already have pbs etc, now ill have full backups on site. Next is to find someone i trust to install a nas at their house…
I’ve been considering one of these (not sure which yet) for rebuilding my Proxmox Backup Server that’s currently running on an Odroid H3+ N6005 system.
That little thing has been rock solid and sips power, but it only has two SATA ports and I’d prefer to have two mirror vdevs using smaller SATA SSDs than my current 2x1.92 TB enterprise SSD setup.
Two potential downsides that have kept me from doing it:
Even though the drives aren’t being pushed to their limits, a single 2.5 Gbps NIC is honestly fast enough for a home backup server unless a lot of clients are trying to connect at once. Still, I wanna go fast. 
(I think there’s an eMMC slot, but Proxmox VE does not like being installed onto eMMC. Not sure about Proxmox Backup Server. If eMMC was available and a stable option, you could use a 10 GbE adapter for m.2 NVME slots for more network bandwidth, or even use it as part of a mirror pool for the OS.)
