12-22-2015, 01:09 PM
(12-22-2015, 11:59 AM)hazerty Wrote: you can use USB/SATA adpater, but I don't know if will boot.
It's an Allwinner tablet SoC. These boot from NAND/eMMC when available or SD card or via USB through FEL mode (great since you really can not brick any Allwinner device. It will boot again).
That means in the Pine64's case: You can boot from SD card (u-boot's task) and then have the rootfs on USB (every single USB enclosure contains just an USB-to-SATA bridge). But that won't help with performance. It's always just USB 2.0.
And if sometimes mainline kernel support for the A64 will be available then this means we might use UASP and can reach up to 40 MB/s. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon so better expect ~30-35 MB/s. In case you use a really crappy USB-to-SATA bridge you'll end up with 15/30 MB/s (that happened to other sunxi based SBCs: the Orange Pi Plus and Banana Pi M3 that both use an ultra-slow GL830 bridge to be advertised as being "SATA capable":
http://linux-sunxi.org/USB/UAS
In other words: No, still no SATA support. It's impossible with A64. If you need I/O bandwidth choose a SoC that supports SATA or at least a few independent USB busses (unlike the A64 used on Pine64/64+)