Pine 64 Review after deep testing
I've been out of the blog for a few months. You know, between summer and some trips, I have been out of the computer. I did not have time to publish many posts I had in mind. However, now I'm back to normal, so let's start the engines! Some posts ago I made a promise, so as I said, here it goes:
This new post is going to be the continuation of the Unboxing of the Pine 64:
Before any review is done, the product must be tested. That's something I have been doing since the first day. The Pine 64 has been running nonstop 24/7 until now.
Testing Data:
Board: Pine 64+ 2Gb (no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth module).
OS: Ubuntu Xenial 16.04.1 LTS (Here you can check how to install it.)
Running as: Server.
Service: Plex Media Server.
Power supply: Aukey ® USB power Hub 40W / 8A, 5 ports. (2A per port, sharing power supply with a Raspberry Pi 2B).
So there you have it. Let's start from the beginning. I was one of the early build bakers. I received my Pine64 back on May 2, 2016. The OS installation was pretty forward, with no mayor problems, as expected. The use I was looking for, was a Plex Media server, so I started to investigate on the official forum. And I found a couple of post which helped me a lot.
The installation of Plex following the guide. It was pretty easy and in 30 minutes, the server was already running. I connected my 2Tb HDD, and started to add all the media. It took over 5 hours to complete the process, with the metadata download and its organization. (5 hours for nearly 2tb was pretty fast).
Since then, the Pine 64 has been running non-stop for 144 days (since unboxing day until today), streaming mainly music and some series/films I had on my library. The pine 64 has been supporting about 4 hours of music streaming, 1h of video streaming, and the auto maintenance of the server (checking for new media, database optimization, ...), for 2 hours, every day. That's a total of 7 hours of use per day, over 1000h hours of load in total.
NO SINGLE PROBLEM over those 4 months and 21 days. The maintenance of the board was null, just a couple of remote connections for updating the Plex server for new versions and nothing else.
Conclusion
For being the first model of the company, I would say from my personal experience that, the Pine 64 is solid. Great price, for great performance. It has given me all I asked and never failed to do a task. Its community is still growing and expanding, so don't expect to find information as easy as you would do for a Raspberry Pi.
It is more than I expected, I totally recommend it.
Pros
- RAM (Up to 2Gb).
- 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet port.
- Android support with GPU acceleration.
- Additional IO pins.
- Cheap & Fast.
Cons
- 2 USB ports.
- Size, a bit big.
- Community still on development. (Help us improve it, up voting the proposal on Stack Exchange Community).
Hopefully for the next version will improve those cons, and let's see how much has gowned its community. For now, my rating is: 4 starts out of 5.