I am evaluating one of these as a headless LMS server. So far it seems ideal. The HC1 has an 8-core arm CPU and 2GB of DDR3 ram + GB ethernet. For thermal stability, the entire HC1 frame is a large aluminum heatsink. What makes the HC1 superior to the Raspberry and many other small systems is the full-speed SATA connection for a 2.5" SSD or spinning HDD. I chose an SSD for total silence. The drive slides right into the heatsink/frame with no cables or mounting hardware needed.
HC1 stands for Home Cloud 1, a basic but powerful system meant to be used as a server; there is no video, no audio, no wifi and only 1 USB port. Odroid also makes the Home Cloud 2, which is the same hardware but the heatsink/frame is large enough to hold a 3.5" spinning SATA drive or a 2.5" SSD or 2.5" spinning drive. I like the much smaller size of the HC1 and I do not wish to invest in any more spinning drives if I can help it.
A microSD card is required for booting, but it's possible to move the operating system from the microSD to the SSD, so that's what I did. I'm using Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS on a 16GB partition of the 2TB SSD. LMS was easy to install with the dpkg program. I used the 32-bit version for arm devices.
My library is a bit over 1 TB, so it fits on the 2 TB SanDisk SSD with lots of room to grow. There are about 35,000 tracks, mostly FLAC, so it's a reasonable test for the hardware.
LMS runs very well on the Odroid. The web interface is downright snappy. As a stress test, I streamed hi-res music (24/96) to all 3 of my players at once. The CPU usage for the server was around 11%. If I stream hi-res to the Touch only, CPU usage drops to about 2%. If I stream 16/44.1 audio to all 3 players (no conversion required on the server) the CPU usage is around 5%.
Total system memory usage has been steady at only 210-215 MB. It did spike to about 315 MB during a scan, but with 2GB of ram I have plenty to spare. The system draws less than 5 watts of power, so it's perfect for a 24/7/365 server.
Price of the Odroid hardware is $49 + $13 for a power supply, $5 for a case, $8 for a microSD = $75.
The 2 TB SSD was just under $200.
I really like the low power draw, the small size, the reasonable cost and especially the silence.
I did a "clear library and rescan" on my old server as well as on the Odroid. The music library is the same on each system.
On my big noisy Intel i3 server with 8GB RAM, it took 18:03.
The Odroid completed the scan in 9:17! Wow!
I'm guessing the Odroid was helped a lot by scanning an SSD while the Intel i3 had to scan a spinning drive. Also, on the Odroid I'm running the LMS server and scanner processes at higher than normal priority levels. I gave more resources to LMS since it's really the only thing I will be running on the Odroid except for a firewall and Samba. But the higher priorities almost certainly gave the Odroid an edge during the scan.
I monitored the CPUs on the Odroid during the scan. 2 of the "big" cores were handling the scan, running about 50% each, and the other 2 "big" cores were loafing along at 2-3%. The 4 "little" cores were idle. I would estimate overall CPU usage at around 15% during a scan. I will be tweaking the performance even further as I go, but for now I am very pleased.
HC1 stands for Home Cloud 1, a basic but powerful system meant to be used as a server; there is no video, no audio, no wifi and only 1 USB port. Odroid also makes the Home Cloud 2, which is the same hardware but the heatsink/frame is large enough to hold a 3.5" spinning SATA drive or a 2.5" SSD or 2.5" spinning drive. I like the much smaller size of the HC1 and I do not wish to invest in any more spinning drives if I can help it.
A microSD card is required for booting, but it's possible to move the operating system from the microSD to the SSD, so that's what I did. I'm using Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS on a 16GB partition of the 2TB SSD. LMS was easy to install with the dpkg program. I used the 32-bit version for arm devices.
My library is a bit over 1 TB, so it fits on the 2 TB SanDisk SSD with lots of room to grow. There are about 35,000 tracks, mostly FLAC, so it's a reasonable test for the hardware.
LMS runs very well on the Odroid. The web interface is downright snappy. As a stress test, I streamed hi-res music (24/96) to all 3 of my players at once. The CPU usage for the server was around 11%. If I stream hi-res to the Touch only, CPU usage drops to about 2%. If I stream 16/44.1 audio to all 3 players (no conversion required on the server) the CPU usage is around 5%.
Total system memory usage has been steady at only 210-215 MB. It did spike to about 315 MB during a scan, but with 2GB of ram I have plenty to spare. The system draws less than 5 watts of power, so it's perfect for a 24/7/365 server.
Price of the Odroid hardware is $49 + $13 for a power supply, $5 for a case, $8 for a microSD = $75.
The 2 TB SSD was just under $200.
I really like the low power draw, the small size, the reasonable cost and especially the silence.
I did a "clear library and rescan" on my old server as well as on the Odroid. The music library is the same on each system.
On my big noisy Intel i3 server with 8GB RAM, it took 18:03.
The Odroid completed the scan in 9:17! Wow!
I'm guessing the Odroid was helped a lot by scanning an SSD while the Intel i3 had to scan a spinning drive. Also, on the Odroid I'm running the LMS server and scanner processes at higher than normal priority levels. I gave more resources to LMS since it's really the only thing I will be running on the Odroid except for a firewall and Samba. But the higher priorities almost certainly gave the Odroid an edge during the scan.
I monitored the CPUs on the Odroid during the scan. 2 of the "big" cores were handling the scan, running about 50% each, and the other 2 "big" cores were loafing along at 2-3%. The 4 "little" cores were idle. I would estimate overall CPU usage at around 15% during a scan. I will be tweaking the performance even further as I go, but for now I am very pleased.
