for what purpose Pine64 added PCIEx4 card on this sbc ?

[seaurchin]

What is the purpose of adding PCIE-x4 slot on rockpro64 ? and what is the speed limit ?

[dukla2000]

For example to add NVMe or SATA disks.

Speed limit x4, AFAIK most disks are the limit rather than the bus.

[seaurchin]

For example to add NVMe or SATA disks.

Speed limit x4, AFAIK most disks are the limit rather than the bus.

Have you tried PCIE card made by other make than Pine64 ?

[xalius]

When you use random PCIe cards it depends on a couple of things, a lot of the more complex cards have an option ROM or general ROM that contains some firmware that is run on the main CPU, but it's firmware for x86 ... so the card will not initialise. There are some projects out there that try to run the option firmware during boot with emulation, but that's very experimental. For some cards, there is actually ARM firmware you can update from the vendor, but I have only seen that for expensive 10 and 40Gbit NICs.

edit: https://www.suse.com/c/revolutionizing-a...m-aarch64/

[dukla2000]

Have you tried PCIE card made by other make than Pine64 ?

I've used 2 different NVMe adapters, neither of which was made by Pine64, and I haven't had problems with either of them.