Helios64

Overview

The Helios64 is Kobol's flagship open-source NAS board, representing a significant upgrade over its predecessor Helios4. Powered by the Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core SoC with dual high-performance Cortex-A72 cores and four efficiency Cortex-A53 cores, it delivers considerably more CPU headroom for media transcoding, encryption, and multiple simultaneous user workloads compared to the Armada 388 generation.

The board is purpose-built for personal cloud storage with five SATA 3.0 ports, a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port for fast LAN transfers, WiFi 5 (802.11ac) with Bluetooth 5.0, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 16GB of eMMC for the OS. A built-in UPS battery circuit protects against unexpected power cuts, and the board's open hardware design — with full schematics and PCB files published on GitHub — provides complete transparency for advanced users and commercial integrators alike.

Running Armbian with OpenMediaVault or similar NAS software stacks, the Helios64 is capable of saturating a Gigabit LAN connection for sequential file transfers, supporting Plex media server with hardware-accelerated transcoding via the RK3399 VPU, and hosting multiple services simultaneously. It is aimed at power users who demand more performance from their self-hosted storage than entry-level NAS appliances can provide, while maintaining full software freedom and data ownership.