SATA?

[hlide]

@Galileo why is tllim wrong? he said "The Orang Pi using Allwinner H3 SOC [is] which doesn't have the native Sata port". This is precisely the one using H3 which is similar to A64, not the others.

[tllim]

Meh I'm not really interested in that little bandwidth. It's too bad there's no way to add more storage on a decent bandwidth interface.

Look at orange pi plus / orange pi plus2 - they have a sata port.

The Orang Pi using Allwinner H3 SOC which doesn't have the native Sata port. Their Sata port is derive out from USB port, which means similar bandwidth as Pine A64.

Wrong. Orange Pi and Orange Pi Mini have native SATA, 2 USB2 host and 1 USB2 OTG port (based on Allwinner A20). All other currently available Orange Pi's are based on the H3 and there it's true: The H3 features just 3 USB2 host ports and 1 USB2 OTG port and SATA is the result of using an USB bridge chip.

But there's the upcoming Orange Pi 3 based on Allwinner's H64. This Soc suffers from the same problems as the A64 you use. Only one single USB2 host port and one USB2 OTG. Since you take $12 for shipping and $29 for the version with Gigabit Ethernet and 2 GB RAM I would suspect Orange Pi 3 will be less expensive in the end (they also ship from Shenzhen like you. But for less than $4 worldwide)

If based on A20, then there is native SATA port. As I read their website, the Orange Pi Plus is using H3 SoC. http://www.orangepi.org/

[Galileo]

@Galileo why is tllim wrong? he said "The Orang Pi using Allwinner H3 SOC [is] which doesn't have the native Sata port". This is precisely the one using H3 which is similar to A64, not the others.

Sorry, I've overread that. Was more focussed on the more general bandwidth discussion. And there A20 and H3 easily outperform A64/H64.

It's a bit sad Allwinner equipped A64/H64 with just one real USB2 port.

[Groupers]

Yes, I have a Banana Pi which has an actual SATA interface with an A20. The bandwidth is good enough to saturate gbit Ethernet but their Ethernet drivers are crap and I can't get even 500Mbps. The update says Pine64 is working with Western Digital and shows a SATA drive connected to a USB adapter, again limiting us to somewhere in the 20MBps range, which is basically worthless and we could do that with any other ARM SBC.

On another topic, I don't understand the OpenWRT support at all. This thing has only USB 2.0; so, no option for adding another NIC with decent speed. What on earth would you do with a router OS on a board with only one network interface?

[Groupers]

I don't want an open hardware router I want to build a low power network imaging server which requires fast network and fast storage.

The banana Pi and other SBCs with the A20 have fast native SATA.

It's too bad Allwinner didn't include SATA in any other SoC.

[Yupnim]

Is there any way to connect hdd (or ssd) via sata connection?

[tllim]

Is there any way to connect hdd (or ssd) via sata connection?

There is no Sata port on Pine A64 board, you can connect Sata drive to Pine A64 thru USB. There is USB to Sata cable that available in market. The USB bus speed is slower than Sata bus speed.
Another way is using WD PiDrive and here is the link: http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/Di...d.13096100

[simonritchie]

> you can connect Sata drive to Pine A64 thru USB

How do you do that?

I have a Verbatim SSD. It contains a SATA disk and comes packaged up with a SATA to USB connector. It's formatted with a VFAT file system. If I plug it into my Ubuntu laptop, the system creates /dev/sdb1 and automounts the disk using that device.

If I connect the same disk to my Pine64, the disk light comes on but no device is created and the disk doesn't mount. I'm running the Pine under Ubuntu.

[lenny.raposo-pine64.pro]

it means there isn't enough power getting to the drive. do you have a powered hub you can use to give it the extra juice it requires (the drive that is).

[simonritchie]

Doh. Should have thought of that. It works with the powered hub, and access is much faster than access to the local microSD card.

As I said earlier, I'm running Ubuntu Linux, and my SSD comes ready-built with a VFAT filestore. I had to mount the SSD by hand. I plugged it in and my system created the device /dev/sda1. I then did:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/verbatim

$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/verbatim

I can access the disk as root, but for some reason, I can't create files on it belonging to an ordinary user:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/verbatim/junk

$ sudo chown ubuntu /mnt/verbatim/junk
chown: changing ownership of '/mnt/verbatim/junk': Operation not permitted

I can find lots of explanations of that error message, but they all advise me to run chown under sudo, which I am doing.

So I have to run my test program using sudo. (More work needed!)

To test the performance I used a hacked version of a Go program written by a friend.

For those who don't know, UNIX systems cache recently used bits of files in memory, both when reading and writing them. To test disk access speed you need to read and write enough data to defeat the cache. However, if you create too many files in one directory, that can slow down access significantly - about 100 files per directory is OK. Also, you have to avoid filling the disk partition. As the partition approaches capacity, write speed reduces significantly as the system scrabbles around trying to find spare blocks to write to.

My Pine64 has 2GB of memory, so my program creates 25 directories and creates 100 files in each, writing 1 Megabyte to each file. So it creates 2.5 GB of data.. Once it's created all the files, it reads them all back, one by one. However big the disk memory cache is, this will flood it, and the average read and write times that you get will give some idea of the real performance you would get when handling a big file, such as a 4K video.

In fact, when writing to the solid state disk, the performance settled down at around the fourth or fifth directory, which gives a clue as to how big the memory cache is. When writing to the Micro SD card, performance varied throughout the test between 12 and 18 seconds per directory. The read speeds were fairly consistent for both devices.

The results were:
Write Read
Solid State Disk connected via USB2: 30 MB/sec 24 MB/sec
MicroSD: 9 MB/sec 17 MB/sec

The solid state disk is meant to connect via a USB3 connection. Connecting via USB2 slows it down significantly. I look forward to a future version of the Pine64 with USB3 ports.

Conclusion:

You will get different results depending on which solid state disk package you use, and which microSD card, but if you want to use your Pine64 as a conventional desktop computer, a solid-state disk should speed up the performance, especially on disk writes. You will need a powered USB hub to make it all work.

You also need to be able to mount the disk and access it as a user other than root. Anybody know how to do that?