Author: erol

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High Performance USB stick formatting with ext4

To format my USB sticks that I use following set of commands:

Assuming my USB stick is recognized as sdc, and has a primary partition created this is the set of commands that I use:

# create ext4 filesystem without journal
 mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdc1

# give your newly formatted partition a name
 e2label /dev/sdc1 storage

# Use data mode for filesystem as writeback for better performance
 tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdc1 

# Disable reserved space on my 57GB drive it wastes 5% which is 3GB
 tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1
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Pine64 2GB DDR3 SDRAM, 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet port unpacking and quick review

Even though in my mid May post I said I will not go into future endeavors with low cost devices this one I have ordered long time ago (April 2016) and it was delayed with shipping.

Pine64 looked interesting and promising since they raised $1.7M on Kickstarter offered 3 different variants for affordable price.

Allwinner is awful with their open source support so you will not be using this device for your next media center since Kodi will not work, but since it has 2GB RAM and 1Gb Ethernet it seems perfect fit for a small home server. Continue reading “Pine64 2GB DDR3 SDRAM, 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet port unpacking and quick review”

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OrangePi poor replacement for the real Raspberry Pi

I was intrigued with low price of Orange Pi PC on GearBest site and since I had a lot of unused points I decided to order one even though I did not really need it. For a few bucks you get quad core CPU, 1GB of RAM, Ethernet all the bells and whistles as Raspberry Pi for third of the price.

What could go wrong? Well it seems for this price you get what you paid for a third of quality manufacturing. As soon as I opened my box I noticed that the board is slightly bent as you can see on the picture here: Continue reading “OrangePi poor replacement for the real Raspberry Pi”