3-14, PiDay. Sadly the day Stephen Hawking passed away - and the day the new Raspberry Pi 3B Plus was unveiled.
Some days later, I got a small package:
With that small thing at hand, I was looking through the list of changes:
- Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz
- 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11.b/g/n/ac wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE
- Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0 (maximum throughput 300 Mbps)
- Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support (requires separate PoE HAT)
Ok, CPU bumped from 1.2 to 1.4 GHz, new WiFi with 802.11ac (and 5 GHz support), BLE 4.2, PoE "support" - and Gigabit over USB 2.0.
Well, not too bad.
One of the biggest downsides of the RPi - since its release - was the design choice to add Ethernet over USB 2.0 - while sharing the one and only USB 2.0 lane of the BCM with all the other USB sockets of the RPi. While this choice leads to lower production costs, it also limits the speed of Ethernet / USB especially in case where people tried to implement NAS or File sharing applications with an added USB Drive over Ethernet. To see how much the new design improved that old problem, I decided to Benchmark an "old" RPi 3B with the latest RPi 3B+ in the discipline of NFS.
Test setup:
- Raspbian Stretch Lite (March 2018 / 2018-03-13 / Kernel 4.9)
- WD PiDrive 314 GB as HDD via USB
- Gigabit Ethernet Switch
- Benchmarking system: Windows 10 with MS NFS Client, Crystal Disk Mark 4.0.3 and Gigabit Ethernet
- NFS Exports Options: (rw,sync,no_subtree_check,all_squash,anonuid=65534,anongid=65534)
The benchmark started with the old RPi 3B and no surprises:
The RPi 3B is lacking throughput at its USB 2.0 lane.
Next up, was the new RPi 3B+:
And - yes - the new design really showed some improvement, to say the least.
However, I was wondering: What would happen if I added an SBC with a real USB 2.0 connection and real Gigabit Ethernet to the test?
Well - I did that. Welcome the now 4 years old Banana Pi 1:
We are talking here about a 1 GHz Dual Core A20 processor with 1 GB RAM which is - i need to repeat - 4 years old - releases just 2 months before the Raspberry Pi 1 B+ came out - I direct competitor of the RPi 1st Generation. But, what happens if we use the SATA port - which is also included on the BPi? With... lets say... some Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD - which I had laying around? 😉
And what happens if I plug that in via USB?
Ok. Thats a bit confusing, to say the least. Could be that the SATA port is actually just coupled via USB to the BPi - however, I saw benchmarks on which the SATA port performed a lot better on the BPi. For this benchmark, I used ARMBIAN:
ARMBIAN Debian Server mainline Kernel Armbian_5.38_Bananapi_Debian_stretch_next_4.14.14 Welcome to ARMBIAN 5.38 stable Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) 4.14.18-sunxi
So, bundling an SSD with some old SBC board will not give you the needed freedom to just drop buying expensive storage for your datacenters and replacing them with small boards - sadly ;). However, we could see that the new RPi 3B+ improved a lot in one of its weak points - but still gets beaten by an very old - and still very feisty rival.