RockPro64 and Pine H64 Discussion Thread

[fonix232]

What are the improvements of rockpro64 over rock64? Worth upgrading if just using as media player or no?

Rockpro64 has more powerful CPU and GPU. However, for media player and NAS area, just stay with ROCK64.

Hi TL, I'm very happy about my Rock64 NAS setup equipped with a 2-bay USB 3.0 dock and 2 HDDs sitting on it. However, the bandwidth is bottleneck by single USB 3.0 which the speed will split in half when 2 HDDs using at the same time. 

Q is, will Pine H64 equipped with mini PCIe to 2 sata card performs better for a 2 bay nas use, like supporting 2 native sata and their speed under Openmediavault? Is it worthy to update H64 from Rock 64? Will either RockPro64 or H64 support one or two SATA or USB expansion cards in long run? 

Much appreciated for your read and answer. 

Cheers,
David

USB 3.0 bandwidth is 5Gbps. A regular 2.5" HDD will give you around 800-1200Mbps tops, so even with the 20% overhead of USB+SATA, and that is if we ignore UAS (which helps reducing the overhead to around 10%). This can be further reduced by using a USB RAID controller, which will take care of the inter-disk communication (i.e. disks attached won't be saturating the USB link for RAID or JBOD data sync).

This means that in theory you can safely attach even four HDDs to a single USB 3.0 port, and it will regain about 90% of the total HDD bandwidth. With the RockPro64, you'll be getting 3 USB 3.0 ports (2x USB A hosts, plus the Type-C port). Question is if the Type-C port will support the extra bandwidth provided by the extra lanes, which in case would mean 10Gbps, or even 20Gbps - which still falls short of Thunderbolt speeds (40Gbps), but would easily handle up to 12-14 HDDs at full speed (or 5x SATA-speed SSDs, or 2x NVMe SSDs, if a USB adapter existed).

What I'd be happier to see is an NVMe supporting board, which could drop the onboard eMMC storage, and provide faster, more compact systems. But looks like I'm gonna wait for that a few more years...