NFS Benchmarking RPi 3B, RPi 3B+ & BPi

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 12:07:44 +0000

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.

3B+ on Nico Maas

NFS Benchmarking RPi 3B, RPi 3B+ & BPi