Hi, I'm planning on buying Orange Pi Zero and before I do that, I want to make sure I won't regret anything after buying it. I'm planning on using the pi zero as a wireless router with its built-in wifi, but I read on some posts that the driver XR819 itself has some issues, like heating up the board or high ping. So please suggest me which distro I should use for the pi zero that has no wifi issues. Thank you.

I read on some posts that the driver XR819 itself has some issues

 

There was one guy around who constantly spread huge amounts of insane BS regarding this 'driver'. He got now a final warning and I hope he'll never start again to spread BS and destroy threads. At least here.

 

Regarding XR819: The driver has issues but that's not the main problem since you can't expect from 'cheapest hardware possible' superior performance/reliability. Ever heard of 'you get what you pay for'?

 

Regarding state of driver (this is not a distro but a kernel/driver thing) please read here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/3243-orange-pi-zero-xradio-st-cw1200/ (we as Armbian community are in a lucky position having those guys really working on the mainline variant of this driver communicating here in the forum. But immanent hardware problems can not be solved in software so while driver improvements might eliminate the TX retransmits currently most likely being responsible for very low throughput you still shouldn't expect anything regarding performance from the cheapest Wi-Fi solution currently available. No wonders possible)

 

TL;DR: That's not a distro issue and simply forget about anything Wi-Fi related that's beyond IoT use cases. You get what you pay for! It's really easy to understand this relationship.

There was one guy around who constantly spread huge amounts of insane BS regarding this 'driver'. He got now a final warning and I hope he'll never start again to spread BS and destroy threads. At least here.

 

Regarding XR819: The driver has issues but that's not the main problem since you can't expect from 'cheapest hardware possible' superior performance/reliability. Ever heard of 'you get what you pay for'?

 

Regarding state of driver (this is not a distro but a kernel/driver thing) please read here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/3243-orange-pi-zero-xradio-st-cw1200/ (we as Armbian community are in a lucky position having those guys really working on the mainline variant of this driver communicating here in the forum. But immanent hardware problems can not be solved in software so while driver improvements might eliminate the TX retransmits currently most likely being responsible for very low throughput you still shouldn't expect anything regarding performance from the cheapest Wi-Fi solution currently available. No wonders possible)

 

TL;DR: That's not a distro issue and simply forget about anything Wi-Fi related that's beyond IoT use cases. You get what you pay for! It's really easy to understand this relationship.

 

What about the NAS performance of this board, I'm also planning on using it as a little NAS server with its USB 2.0 ports. What transfer speed are you getting with this board?

4.9.4 kernel. upto 450 kb/s file transfer speed.

4.9.4 kernel. upto 450 kb/s file transfer speed.

 

Is this KB/s or really kb/s? Wi-Fi or Ethernet?

 

Anyway: OPi Zero has only Fast Ethernet so with Armbian default settings (IoT oriented and therefore consumption and not performance optimized) NAS performance over Ethernet might be between 5 and 8 MB/s. Wi-Fi is crappy anyway (2.4GHz band and single antenna only) so simply don't even think about 'performance'. Some people reported 10, some other 20 Mbits/sec when board and AP are close together (and we still have unresolved performance issues in TX direction, that means 'download from NAS').

 

The only way to get decent NAS speeds over Ethernet with this device can be found in a thread that's surprisingly called H3 devices as NAS. If you're interested in good NAS performance over Wi-Fi then please forget about any SBC onboard solution. The only Armbian devices with support for performant Wi-Fi are those featuring mPCIe slots (all from Solid-Run).

Is this KB/s or really kb/s? Wi-Fi or Ethernet?

this is KB/s, Wi-Fi as client. Signal level -69 dbm