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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a low-power RISC or ARM hardware that supports many SATA ports?

The Pi Compute Module exposes its PCIe bus. You can use something like the Wiretrustee SATA to connect SATA disks: https://sata.wiretrustee.com

Well, you will be able to. Coming soon.

I don't know about low power (or inexpensive, for that matter), but the HiFive Unmatched has lots of IO. 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 can be expanded into quite a few SATA 3 ports.

For ARM, rk3568 is available now and has 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 and up to 3 SATA-3 ports. As opposed to the rpi4 which has a single PCIe 2.1 lane.

It's inexpensive in that it can't be bought, at least

FriendlyElec's NanoPi M4 has a 4-port hat. Their NanoPC T4 has a M.2 PCIe x4 that has potential to be adapted to full-size slot.

Pine64's Rockpro64 has a regular x4 slot for expansion cards.

I've seen lots of upcoming Pi CM4 options, but don't know what's out yet.

NanoPI M4 burned two SD cards and destroyed its own eMMC module due to some weird behavior while I was using it for NAS.

No idea what caused it, I suspect excessive writes and wearing the flash storage or corrupting the bootloader and not being able to recognize the boot media. The "wear" I mentioned could be something else of course, but except the normal OS writes, everything went to the SATA drives.

It sounded like a solid piece of hardware with the 4 SATA-ports-hat and good CPU, but at the end it turned out to be un-reliable as at some point the OS hang, couldn't boot from the OS storage and the bootloader wasn't seeing the partitions via UART debug session.

Huh. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that would cause it to chew up 2 SD cards is excessive amounts of logging. Nothing else really seems to make much sense.

Don't know why anyone hasn't made such a board a priority. Seems like a sweet spot.

Yeah I would love not being dependent on x86 and its horrid UEFI mess. Then again... I believe technically ARM (and even RISC-V) board manufacturers can also make something similar. Let's hope that doesn't become a thing though.

Why not? I've been working from the view that UEFI is the one of the few things worth keeping from x86_64 - I do not want to deal with every board having its own special boot process that prevents one disk being able to boot different machines. And UEFI is already here and works, so why reinvent the wheel?

RISC-V took steps to prevent chaos.

The application profiles (like RVA22) have a bunch of requirements on hardware that must be present, the boot process and interface the firmware offers to the OS (i.e. opensbi).

Ok but does any of that work in practice? Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Cause that’s how it works in PC land thanks to ACPI tables.

I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! And apparently those are the only 2 boards with ISOs available 0_o

>Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size?

Yes, you will be able to, at some point.

>I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor!

No board out there is RVA22 compliant, as RVA22 itself isn't done and closed. It is expected to be this spring.

By the time large scale production of boards happen and they ship to the masses, this will be a solved problem.

I do not expect this to happen this year. Maybe the next it'll start to pick up.

Now there’s a hot take! In PC land the same bootloader, kernel, config files, etc will work in pretty much computer. Hot swappable components are the norm here.

Meanwhile in ARM/RISC-V embedded land, every chip and every board is its own special snowflake. With no ACPI/UEFI, someone’s gotta hardcode the config of every device on every board, including the ones inside the SoC. Naturally the communities around these boards are even more fragmented than Linux distros already are.

So you want yo be dependent on u-boot plus sketchy binary blobs mess?

The new RK3588 boards look promising. ITX3588J comes with 4 SATA ports and a PCIe 3 x4 slot that you could add more with, but it's not shipping yet.

If "two" is acceptable for "many", look at the ODROID-HC4? I made some home NASs out of them.

Would also love to see this, even if it's experimental or beta.

PiBox is the only contender I am aware of.

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