Setting Up an Odroid HC4 as a Plex Server and NAS

Working with an x86 CPU might seem daunting, but when it comes to working with a low-end ARM chip like the Amlogic S905X3, the setup process can be just as straightforward. In fact, installing a operating system on this type of device is often simpler than what you'd expect from a more powerful CPU. For this review, I opted to use Ubuntu Mate, a distribution that offers an ease of use that's hard to resist.

One of the key features of the Odroid HC4 is its ability to set up automatically mount your storage devices, making it an excellent choice for creating a NAS (Network-Attached Storage) or media server. In my case, I've already set up the Odroid HC4 to automatically mount my one terabyte drive, which I've named HC4 One Terabyte. This makes it incredibly easy to transfer files or bring files from this unit into any PC or phone in my house.

For those looking to use their Odroid HC4 as a Plex server, the process is straightforward. You can download the Dead Package from Plexus website and install the Arm v8 version directly. This will have you up and running in no time. I took advantage of this option and installed the latest version of Plex on my HC4, which automatically started on launch in the background.

I wanted to test out the Odroid HC4's capabilities as a media server, so I created a small test setup using some 1080p videos that play perfectly on all of my devices. The HC4 handled them with ease, displaying them at 60 frames per second and maintaining a smooth playback experience even when streaming from the device itself.

In addition to its media serving capabilities, the Odroid HC4 also features an internal disk benchmark tool. I ran this test on both my one terabyte mechanical drive and a 240GB Kingston SSD, which showed impressive performance results for both drives. The average read speed of the mechanical drive was 156 megabytes per second, while the SSD clocked in at 241 megabytes per second.

The SSD's superior performance is largely due to its faster access times, with an average write speed of 176 megabytes per second and an average access time of 0.18 milliseconds. While this means that running larger storage devices on the HC4 may become more expensive, it also opens up possibilities for those who can afford it.

I have a few ideas in mind for future videos featuring the Odroid HC4, including a full Open Media Vault tutorial and exploring other potential use cases like retro gaming or running a full-fledged PC. If you're interested in learning more about the Odroid HC4 or would like to suggest any specific projects you'd like me to work on, please let me know in the comments below.

For those who are still considering purchasing an Odroid HC4, I've included some links to the device and its accessories in the description box. The base model without the OLED is priced at $65, while the one with the OLED costs $75. However, keep in mind that these devices do not come with any storage, so you'll need to provide your own SSD or hard drive if you plan on running everything from the device itself.

The Odroid HC4's real draw for many users will be its PCIe SATA interface, which provides a more traditional storage experience compared to USB 3.0. While this may not be as flashy as some of the other features on offer, it's certainly an attractive option for those who want a more straightforward media server or NAS setup.

In conclusion, the Odroid HC4 is a capable and user-friendly device that offers impressive performance for its price point. With its ability to automatically mount storage devices and its strong media serving capabilities, it's an excellent choice for anyone looking to create a home media center or NAS server.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new odroid hc4 now this is kind of an odd one it is a single board computer when it comes down to it but it does have some pretty awesome features built in as you can see here they do come with their own case it's got a heatsink it's got a fan built in they actually offer two models one with an oled on the front and one without now i think it's pretty cool with the oled but in my opinion it is a bit of a gimmick yes at a glance when it's set up correctly you can get some information on the unit running and things like that but if you're looking to save a little money i would go with the one without the oled now personally when i'm running something like this it's not kind of a showpiece or anything like that we have this clear plastic which actually i think looks pretty cool but once i have something like this up and running it's usually out of the way and i i don't go over to look at that oled display so you might have noticed the two slots on the top here and this was actually released by odroid as their new home cloud platform but there's tons of other stuff that we can do with it if you're not into a home cloud setup now personally i've just tested two one terabyte 3.5 inch drives and some ssds in this unit but they claim it supports up to two 12 terabyte drives so you could use this as a home cloud platform you could use this as a server if you even want to get into retro gaming we do have a lot of operating systems available because after all this is actually based on the odroid c4 so we have the same specs except we have room for two sata drives now when this was initially launched i was under the impression that these sata drives would be running over a usb 3.0 bus but luckily it's running over a more native pcie bus so it's way more reliable and much faster i was getting over 100 megabytes per second moving large files from my windows machine over to this unit to that external one terabyte western digital so let's go ahead and take a look at the internals i've just pulled the top shell off this is the version without the oled as you can see it's very reminiscent of a single board computer because after all it's basically just an arm based sbc like the odroid c4 so taking a look around back here we have our power input 15 volts 4 amps micro sd card slot single usb 2.0 port full size hdmi and gigabyte ethernet taking a closer look as you can see we have those two sata ports we also have uart our five gpio pins for connecting an oled display this one here is the version without it and we also have an ir receiver flipping this thing over choosing the same heatsink as the odroid c4 we also have our fan connector and there's a reset button so when it comes to external i o it really doesn't have a lot going for it i was hoping there was at least one usb 3.0 port on this unit but instead of focusing on external i o they've added that pcie bridge to these two sata connectors so we do have room for a lot of storage and this can be turned into many different things in-home cloud storage using something like open media vault you can set this up as a media server using plex or even corelec it can function as a retro gaming device and when it comes down to it this could actually be used as a small desktop pc because it does support ubuntu mate but you could always run this headless and i think that's what most people will do with something like this now as for ram and the soc they're using here we have four gigabytes of lp ddr4 ram and it's using the s905x3 cpu just like the odroid c4 i mean this is laid out exactly like that board but instead of having external usb 3.0 ports all that's piped into the sata connectors to keep that speed up on our external hard drives or in this case i don't know if we're really going to call them external or not but this is kind of a toaster layout as you can see now this does support petite boot right out of the box so you can boot directly from an external hard drive and i'll be booting from an ssd i've installed ubuntu mate but they also have a version of android available but there's also other third-party operating systems available like armbian okay so here we are like i mentioned there's a lot of different operating systems available for the hc4 we have armbian there's debian and personally i like having a nice user interface i'm a big fan of mate and everything seems to work really well on this little chipset here it's not perfect it's definitely not running as good as an x86 cpu but we're working with a low end arm chip here this is the amlogic s905x3 same thing that's in that c4 now if you want to just set this up with let's say openmedia fault i would recommend installing armbian you can do it headless if you want to maverick over on the odroid forums has a pure debian build for this but i chose ubuntu mate i'm just a big fan of it and like i mentioned i just like the ease of use because the main thing that i'm going to be using this for is a plex server now i've already set this up to automatically mount my one terabyte drive i've just named it hc4 one terabyte and the way it's set up right now is i can connect to this from any pc or phone in my house to transfer files or bring files from this unit here now everybody's use case scenario for something like this will be a little bit different but for me i wanted to set this up as kind of a little plex server for in the house and i got that one terabyte drive i got some videos on it super easy to install you can do it through terminal or you can download the dead package from plexus website and install it directly just get the arm v8 version and you should have it up and running in no time so if i head over here to all that's the first thing i went ahead and installed and this automatically starts on launch in the background so we don't need this interface up or anything like that but i just wanted to bring it up to show you here if we head to more this is what i got set up just as a little test and it's actually been working really well i got some 4k stuff here some 1080p but mainly in the house you stick to 1080p 60 and it works great on all of my devices and here's a quick little demo streaming directly from the hc4 to my phone here i actually have it set at 1080p 12 megabits per second on all these smaller devices i mean that's totally fine it looks great and these videos play perfectly i also wanted to run a quick internal disk benchmark and this is that one terabyte mechanical drive that i have installed here average read speed 156 megabytes a second average right 139 average access time 15.40 milliseconds i'm also going to run the same test on that ssd here and as you can see i mean obviously the ssd is definitely going to beat it out and this is a cheaper ssd this is a 240 gigabyte kingston ssd i think you can get these for like 28 bucks average read speed 241 megabytes a second average write speed 176 megabytes a second and the access time 0.18 milliseconds so yeah i mean if you could afford it and run bigger ssds and something like this it would definitely speed up read and write times and transfer times and things like that but uh it will get a bit expensive so personally the way i want to have this setup is basically what i have now i have the ssd running my operating system and the other drive will be my transfer drive or my cloud drive it'll be my media drive whatever i want to turn this into i definitely need to spend more time with the odroid hc4 i do have a few ideas in mind and i will have a couple more videos coming up on this unit but i just wanted to give you a quick look now i was planning on doing a full open media vault tutorial using the hc4 so if you're interested in that let me know in the comments below and i can kind of gauge the audience's interest and if you have any other ideas on what to use this unit for besides creating a nas or media server or even retro gaming let me know in the comments below and i can try to whip something up because when it comes down to it all of these single board computers can basically do what we're doing here but i think the main draw to the hc4 is that real pcie sata interface instead of running everything over usb 3.0 but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about the odroid hc4 i will leave a few links in the description the base model without the o led is 65 the one with the oled is 75 but remember these don't come with any storage so if you just want to run from an ssd or a hard drive you have to provide that or a microsd card it's really up to you in the end but that's it for this one if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new odroid hc4 now this is kind of an odd one it is a single board computer when it comes down to it but it does have some pretty awesome features built in as you can see here they do come with their own case it's got a heatsink it's got a fan built in they actually offer two models one with an oled on the front and one without now i think it's pretty cool with the oled but in my opinion it is a bit of a gimmick yes at a glance when it's set up correctly you can get some information on the unit running and things like that but if you're looking to save a little money i would go with the one without the oled now personally when i'm running something like this it's not kind of a showpiece or anything like that we have this clear plastic which actually i think looks pretty cool but once i have something like this up and running it's usually out of the way and i i don't go over to look at that oled display so you might have noticed the two slots on the top here and this was actually released by odroid as their new home cloud platform but there's tons of other stuff that we can do with it if you're not into a home cloud setup now personally i've just tested two one terabyte 3.5 inch drives and some ssds in this unit but they claim it supports up to two 12 terabyte drives so you could use this as a home cloud platform you could use this as a server if you even want to get into retro gaming we do have a lot of operating systems available because after all this is actually based on the odroid c4 so we have the same specs except we have room for two sata drives now when this was initially launched i was under the impression that these sata drives would be running over a usb 3.0 bus but luckily it's running over a more native pcie bus so it's way more reliable and much faster i was getting over 100 megabytes per second moving large files from my windows machine over to this unit to that external one terabyte western digital so let's go ahead and take a look at the internals i've just pulled the top shell off this is the version without the oled as you can see it's very reminiscent of a single board computer because after all it's basically just an arm based sbc like the odroid c4 so taking a look around back here we have our power input 15 volts 4 amps micro sd card slot single usb 2.0 port full size hdmi and gigabyte ethernet taking a closer look as you can see we have those two sata ports we also have uart our five gpio pins for connecting an oled display this one here is the version without it and we also have an ir receiver flipping this thing over choosing the same heatsink as the odroid c4 we also have our fan connector and there's a reset button so when it comes to external i o it really doesn't have a lot going for it i was hoping there was at least one usb 3.0 port on this unit but instead of focusing on external i o they've added that pcie bridge to these two sata connectors so we do have room for a lot of storage and this can be turned into many different things in-home cloud storage using something like open media vault you can set this up as a media server using plex or even corelec it can function as a retro gaming device and when it comes down to it this could actually be used as a small desktop pc because it does support ubuntu mate but you could always run this headless and i think that's what most people will do with something like this now as for ram and the soc they're using here we have four gigabytes of lp ddr4 ram and it's using the s905x3 cpu just like the odroid c4 i mean this is laid out exactly like that board but instead of having external usb 3.0 ports all that's piped into the sata connectors to keep that speed up on our external hard drives or in this case i don't know if we're really going to call them external or not but this is kind of a toaster layout as you can see now this does support petite boot right out of the box so you can boot directly from an external hard drive and i'll be booting from an ssd i've installed ubuntu mate but they also have a version of android available but there's also other third-party operating systems available like armbian okay so here we are like i mentioned there's a lot of different operating systems available for the hc4 we have armbian there's debian and personally i like having a nice user interface i'm a big fan of mate and everything seems to work really well on this little chipset here it's not perfect it's definitely not running as good as an x86 cpu but we're working with a low end arm chip here this is the amlogic s905x3 same thing that's in that c4 now if you want to just set this up with let's say openmedia fault i would recommend installing armbian you can do it headless if you want to maverick over on the odroid forums has a pure debian build for this but i chose ubuntu mate i'm just a big fan of it and like i mentioned i just like the ease of use because the main thing that i'm going to be using this for is a plex server now i've already set this up to automatically mount my one terabyte drive i've just named it hc4 one terabyte and the way it's set up right now is i can connect to this from any pc or phone in my house to transfer files or bring files from this unit here now everybody's use case scenario for something like this will be a little bit different but for me i wanted to set this up as kind of a little plex server for in the house and i got that one terabyte drive i got some videos on it super easy to install you can do it through terminal or you can download the dead package from plexus website and install it directly just get the arm v8 version and you should have it up and running in no time so if i head over here to all that's the first thing i went ahead and installed and this automatically starts on launch in the background so we don't need this interface up or anything like that but i just wanted to bring it up to show you here if we head to more this is what i got set up just as a little test and it's actually been working really well i got some 4k stuff here some 1080p but mainly in the house you stick to 1080p 60 and it works great on all of my devices and here's a quick little demo streaming directly from the hc4 to my phone here i actually have it set at 1080p 12 megabits per second on all these smaller devices i mean that's totally fine it looks great and these videos play perfectly i also wanted to run a quick internal disk benchmark and this is that one terabyte mechanical drive that i have installed here average read speed 156 megabytes a second average right 139 average access time 15.40 milliseconds i'm also going to run the same test on that ssd here and as you can see i mean obviously the ssd is definitely going to beat it out and this is a cheaper ssd this is a 240 gigabyte kingston ssd i think you can get these for like 28 bucks average read speed 241 megabytes a second average write speed 176 megabytes a second and the access time 0.18 milliseconds so yeah i mean if you could afford it and run bigger ssds and something like this it would definitely speed up read and write times and transfer times and things like that but uh it will get a bit expensive so personally the way i want to have this setup is basically what i have now i have the ssd running my operating system and the other drive will be my transfer drive or my cloud drive it'll be my media drive whatever i want to turn this into i definitely need to spend more time with the odroid hc4 i do have a few ideas in mind and i will have a couple more videos coming up on this unit but i just wanted to give you a quick look now i was planning on doing a full open media vault tutorial using the hc4 so if you're interested in that let me know in the comments below and i can kind of gauge the audience's interest and if you have any other ideas on what to use this unit for besides creating a nas or media server or even retro gaming let me know in the comments below and i can try to whip something up because when it comes down to it all of these single board computers can basically do what we're doing here but i think the main draw to the hc4 is that real pcie sata interface instead of running everything over usb 3.0 but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about the odroid hc4 i will leave a few links in the description the base model without the o led is 65 the one with the oled is 75 but remember these don't come with any storage so if you just want to run from an ssd or a hard drive you have to provide that or a microsd card it's really up to you in the end but that's it for this one if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching you\n"