Quote from pokymon : Between the two P21 and E02, which one is better?

Definitely E02 is better. Faster single core (no use for the dual core in such simple task device), and more ram helps a lot.

Quote from RaytheonLiszt : Using Optware, I get about 10-15 MB/s file transfer speeds. Reliability wise, it's super stable, never have to reboot it! I have the dual-core version.

That's kind of slow though. You should try Archlinux.

Quote from Rockalittle : Same question

Quote from nicessgg : hard to say which one is better, but P21/B01 has some more interfaces, such as wifi, SATA E02 Architecture ARMv5te Processor Marvell Kirkwood 1.2GHz RAM 256MB NAND 128MB USB 4 Ethernet Gigabit P21/B01 Architecture ARMv6l Processor PLX 7820 700MHz Dual-core RAM 128MB NAND 128MB USB 4 SATA 1 Ethernet Gigabit Wireless B/G/N (Pro) reference: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms...provideov3 http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms...2-pinkgray

P21 does not have wifi. It does have a pci slot if you crack open the case, but I read that Archlinux support is not really there. Also, the P21 has a PLX processor (it's not open) which makes it hard to keep up to date with linux kernels (it's been on 2.6.31.6 for a very long time). So once you install Archlinux, you'll not be touching any updates or anything for a very long time.

Quote from phdeez : I don't think that is necessary for either model... Archlinuxarm.org has some great walkthroughs *AND* a great support forum. E02 Info [archlinuxarm.org] P21/B01 [archlinuxarm.org] Final thought note... I have no idea why people here are saying they only get 10-15MB from these things unless they are using NTFS formatted drives and pulling off 30KB jpegs. With a dockstar formatted as ext3 I saw speeds north of 26MB/s (~208Megabits) constantly and with a GoFlex Home (pogoplug/dockstar with 1 usb and 1 sata) I saw >35MB/s (280Megabits) from an ext3 drive. These numbers are when I'm pulling the above-mentioned 20+gb mkvs thanks to usenet/sabnzbd/couchpotato. Obviously, a GigE network is required to reach these speeds. Again, this experience is with the Armv5 line (E02/dockstar/goflex). I have no idea what type of performance the P21/B01 has, but with the extra RAM and no swapfile requirement, I think similar speeds should be seen.

I have P21 (slow clocked dual core) which has a SATA port, but you have to crack open the case, and also supply power from somewhere for the HDD.
With Archlinux and samba share to Windows computers, here are my results from 7 months ago:
USB write 19MB/s, read 24MB/s
SATA write was 22MB/s, read 29MB/s

SATA is not worth the hassle because the CPU is too slow it can't make use of all the USB bandwidth. Because there's only minor speed difference, I just use the USB port.

I had one 640GB laptop HDD in a USB HDD case, 20GB ext3 partition for Archlinux, the rest 620GB ext4 mounted at "/storage". It was plugged in during the whole 7 months I had the HDD. It's not blazing fast, but the accessibility is the thing I really liked about it. It only uses about 4-5W power so I don't mind keeping it powered on all the time.

I tried installing LAMP server stuff (apache myphp and sql), minidlna, samba, sftp. I tested a bulletin board, and it was pretty slow to load something so it's not worth trying to make a LAMP server. I'm currently using only samba as I don't need any other stuff.