[Arm-netbook] R-Pi Only Better and More Available?

[Scott Sullivan]

On 05/22/2012 05:19 PM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 05/22/2012 05:57 PM, Scott Sullivan wrote:
[...]
>> I really think there is a missed opportunity here without miniPCIe or
>> SATA. But if this does well we might see more feature rich boards in the
>> future.
>
> It is possible that the Via SoC in question doesn't have SATA and PCI.
> But the lack of SATA isn't that big a deal.

That possibility was clear to me, hence my hope for future boards.

The inclusion of miniPCIe would be the most useful as it means that SATA 
could be added along with media decoder cards for SoCs that doesn't have 
great support.

SATA:
http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PM362.html

Video Decoder:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Broadcom_Crystal_HD
http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=BCM970015

> Disk I/O is more about IOPS
> than about MB/s - I get about 2000 IOPS out of a SuperTalent RC8 in my
> Toshiba AC100 (bottlenecked by USB 2, the RC8 is USB 3 capable) and the
> performance is pretty amazing:
>
> http://www.altechnative.net/2012/02/07/morebetter-internal-storage-on-the-toshiba-ac100-part-2/
>
> Sure, a decent SATA SSD will probably beat it, but I would be surprised
> if you could actually feel the difference on an ARM machine of this
> performance. My 1.4GHz Tegra2 certaonly ends up CPU rather than disk I/O
> bound with the RC8.

I as of yet been unable to source these in Canada. In light of that, a 
SATA interface is preferable to the performance of run of the mill SD 
cards and USB sticks, as you yourself have documented. Additionally SATA 
disk are plentiful and I have a choice of vendors, something that is 
currently not the case for RC8 like USB devices.

-- 
Scott Sullivan