Review/Advice for new board owner (support,purchase etc)

[tinkerdan]

Hello and thanks for reading.  I plan on buying a Rockpro64 but was really hoping for some honest advice on several matters.  I like the specs and hardware of this board alot and have heard great things about cmunity support which is why I was drawn to this model.  I've read mixed reviews on alot of things so other owners seem to be the best bet.  First, where is the best place to pruchase the board for the U.S.A (direct from pine64.org etc)?  Second, I own a Tinker Board S and am not a noob with dev boards but I have also never compiled an OS and i do have to research when it comes to more complex tasks like changing uboot or CPU freq etc.  So are the images released fairly stable?  Is pine actively developing their images or is it going to take some work to get this board useable as a basic daily driver Linux PC?  I knows it's a dev board but I will be using it for basic desktop needs including streaming and most likely main dev work will be on the 32 bit board when I become more comfortable.  It will probably be November 2018 by the time I receive it so I'm hoping for any answers or advice you can give.  Thanks again, I'm all ears...I mean eyes to the input.

[evilbunny]

First, where is the best place to pruchase the board for the U.S.A (direct from pine64.org etc)?

You can also order them from https://ameridroid.com/collections/singl.../rockpro64

[tinkerdan]

First, where is the best place to pruchase the board for the U.S.A (direct from pine64.org etc)?

You can also order them from https://ameridroid.com/collections/singl.../rockpro64

Thanks, been wondering about a reputable seller outside of amazon or eBay.

[dukla2000]

[quote pid='41443' dateline='1539275207']
Second, I own a Tinker Board S and am not a noob with dev boards but I have also never compiled an OS and i do have to research when it comes to more complex tasks like changing uboot or CPU freq etc.  So are the images released fairly stable?  Is pine actively developing their images or is it going to take some work to get this board useable as a basic daily driver Linux PC?  I knows it's a dev board but I will be using it for basic desktop needs including streaming and most likely main dev work will be on the 32 bit board when I become more comfortable. 
[/quote]

Pine are not doing any particular image work. They rely on the community which so far has been a chap known as Ayufan. Who is actively supported by Pine. Armbian are possibly about to come to the party.

So if you are used to wintel then not at all complete or stable. However, my rockpro64 is the only pc with power in my house. Kernel support in the mainline is not too bad, in the rockchip derived (by Ayufan) 4.4 is fine depending on your use cases.

[tllim]

First, where is the best place to pruchase the board for the U.S.A (direct from pine64.org etc)?

You can also order them from https://ameridroid.com/collections/singl.../rockpro64

Thanks, been wondering about a reputable seller outside of amazon or eBay.

Ameridroid is a reputable seller.

[elatllat]

...streaming...

video may still use the cpu not the vpu...

[celer]

So I have two of the rock64pro boards, and I really haven't been able to use either for the purpose I had intended due to stability issues. My goal was to be able to replace an Intel-i3 which I use for video capture and analysis around the house, along with a NAS.  One of the rock64pros boots off of eMMC, and the PCI card can see the SATA drive but after any amount of serious usage it throws errors and the drive is set into read only mode. The other rock64pro I have I can sometimes get it to boot from eMMC, but rarely. I haven't been able to get it to boot from the SD card. I tried again today with the latest kernels to see if anything is better, not yet.

So from what I can tell, the one I got working is probably stable just using eMMC.  Two of my coworkers bought a board each and have had similar experiences, and they have set them aside as well, and moved onto other NAS platforms. 

I like this processor and have one of the Samsung ChromeBook Plus with the RK3399 in it, and I adore that Chromebook, the battery life and stability is very good. I've run arch linux on it, and played with it quite a bit. The RK3399 seems powerful enough for the task I have in mind which is doing encoding and capture of 2 - 3 HD security cameras, I just need the Rock64Pro to be stable enough to do this. 

I'm now debating if I could get one to work on the eMMC card alone without an external drive, knowing that HD video capture will probably kill the eMMC card in fairly quick order.

[Bullet64]

I use an ROCKPro64 with sata adapter from pine and two 2,5'' hdd's without any problem.

Code:

rock64@rockpro64v_2_1:~$ uname -a
Linux rockpro64v_2_1 4.19.0-rc4-1071-ayufan-g10a63ec6c2a2 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Oct 1 07:33:40 UTC 2018 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

But i have the same problems with an hdd at usb3. I am now using armbian and my problems are gone away. Give it a try.

[celer]

I use an ROCKPro64 with sata adapter from pine and two 2,5'' hdd's without any problem.

Code:

rock64@rockpro64v_2_1:~$ uname -a
Linux rockpro64v_2_1 4.19.0-rc4-1071-ayufan-g10a63ec6c2a2 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Oct 1 07:33:40 UTC 2018 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

But i have the same problems with an hdd at usb3. I am now using armbian and my problems are gone away. Give it a try.

Ok, 

So here is what I tried that didn't work
- 4 different SATA cables 
- Armbian
- Stretch-minial 7.11, bionic-minimal 7.11, 7.10 
- An external computer power supply to provide power for the drive
- A new SATA PCI card

What appears to have worked is trying a different hard drive, I was using a Samsung EVO 840 SSD, now I'm using a Seagate Momentus 750GB HDD and that seems to be working. 

So clearly something is causing issues with the Samsung Evo 840SSD. I'm gonna set this up with a multi-day stress test and see if it survives with the spinning disk.