On Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 5:57 PM Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > > which I don't think is available yet but will run in the $250 > range without the drives. It appears that the motherboard > they designed takes the PCIe to a card with a PCIe-to-SATA > controller which is how you get better performance.
With the USB3 solution your $40 SBC can directly access a hard drive. Now we're talking about adding $250 of hardware to get to SATA. Honestly, if you're going to start spending that much I'd really question why we're not just using a PC. I would love to see more reasonably-priced ARM options with decent IO and RAM. If you want ARM and 32GB of RAM good luck finding something for under $1k. For anything that runs 24x7 the power savings are quite significant with ARM, but you definitely give up performance and IO and of course general flexibility, If you're going to start spending hundreds of dollars on ARM unless it is as some kind of prototyping setup I'd really question why you wouldn't just use inexpensive PC hardware. Get something with integrated graphics and you have lots of PCIe lanes available for IO. You can get used HBAs fairly inexpensively as well, though I do question the reliability of some of that stuff (used). One other thing, I've used LSI HBAs with Rockpro64 SBCs (which have PCIe), and the HBAs use a ton of power. The RK3399 might use very little power (esp idle), but that LSI HBA is practically a space heater even when idle. Maybe their newer stuff is more efficient, but you're not going to get those for $30 on eBay. -- Rich
