Re:Raspberry Pi 3 on Sale
by astannard on Monday February 29, 2016 @03:44AM
(#11194299)
The Orange Pi 2 Plus has sata and about the same price
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SATA via USB though?
Exactly. And limited to 15MB/s writes.
I made the mistake once of buying an orange pi. I thought, hey, this has better specs, so its better.
I was wrong. Horrible support, 2 of the usb ports never worked. The community is non existent compared to rpi.
I haven't seen anything with directly connected SATA outside of iMX6 boards, and the pins aren't always connected. What did the Ax0 based Cubieboards use?
The original Cubieboards used on-chip AHCI SATA controllers. Allwinner dropped it from their newer chips, presumably because they're targeting tablet use and there's no need for them.
Olimex boards have a direct SATA connection.
This is on a Lime-A10 with a cheap 2.5" 1TB drive, about 70% full so some fragmentation etc:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=6G bs=1M count=6144
6144+0 records in
6144+0 records out
6442450944 bytes (6.4 GB) copied, 136.176 s, 47.3 MB/s
# dd if=6G of=/dev/null bs=1M
6144+0 records in
6144+0 records out
6442450944 bytes (6.4 GB) copied, 93.6363 s, 68.8 MB/s
Also they have a nice battery connector, they'll keep the battery charged and switch to it if main power fails (and even keep the SATA drive powered (not sure if you plug a 3.5" one, though)).
Is native sata that much better than a usb3 adapter? All of the chips that offered sata were SATA 2.0, or 300MB/s. USB3 goes up to 625MB/s.
If a board with SATA 3.0 existed, that is still just 600MB/s.
Re:Raspberry Pi 3 on Sale
by notacoward on Monday February 29, 2016 @07:39AM
(#11195080)
The Banana Pi Pro (not the regular Banana Pi) is the only one I know of that has real SATA.