Pine 64 Review after deep testing

Ivan Exposito -

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:

Pine64 Unboxing
Welcome to my new post. This time we are looking at a product that just got me by mail. This is the PINE64, The first $15 64-Bit Single Board Super Computer, that has raising over $1.7M in Kickstarter. During this post I will just show the unboxing and the
Ivan ExpositoIvan Exposito

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

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.