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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic question, purely for curiosity: MicroSD cards aren't particularly great for IO, correct? What's a next-step-up IO that would still be cheap, and do any companies sell an equivalent-to-RPi3 board with better IO?

(USB should be better than MicroSD, but that takes up CPU, correct?)

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I looked into this as I was after a SATA based arm board with 4gb of memory to replace a desktop of mine that's long in the tooth and for Linux the x86 limitation was moot.

I looked around at the various offerings and the best fit was the Rock64 Pro as it has a PCIe slot that you can add a SATA card, as well as USB3 (which is becoming more common upon ARM SOC boards). https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c...

Least that's the current pick, but things change pretty fast and which means that there may well be a better offering.

But the market for a good ARM based board with some sata, audio - offing a basic desktop alternative at a reasonable price.

However if you after something with umpteen cores, there are offerings out now, though your looking at $1k price range for those. Though none that offer SAS storage, just SATA, which is a shame as these are more workstation affairs spec wise. https://www.avantek.co.uk/powerful-64bit-arm-thunderx-deskto...

EDIT ADD - http://linuxgizmos.com/ is a nice site that keeps abreast of most SOC offerings coming to market.

Excellent reply, thank you for taking the time to type all that out!

Pleasure. Just found out that the NanoPi M4 (which also has a PCIe slot) has a 4x SATA option available, which for a NAS project makes this the current favorite.

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Most Allwinner based boards have direct wired USB ports, ethernet & sound, bypassing the 300Mbps limitation of all I/O on a Raspberry Pi. Allwinner boards usually have blobless mainline kernel support, with H.265 decoding on most chips.

Check out the Clearfog too (good I/O), and OrangePi makes some ok boards.

Thank you, I will check those boards out.

UASP mode can be relatively efficient for USB but it's pretty rare for an ARM SBC to support it.

Boards with SATA support aren't hard to find but you have to be careful of ones that are simply SATA over USB if you're looking to avoid that.

The RockPi 4 is the cheapest board I know of to support m.2 NVMe drives.

Thank you for the informative reply. I had no idea we could get m.2 nvme on such a small board. Very nice!

Onboard eMMC comes to mind, and while not necessarily cheap in terms of price/gb, enough for OS files can be had on some really cheap boards.

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