I bought a BPI-M1 many years back (ten years or so I think) and it’s been running as a sql and Mercurial server, plus NAS with just a couple of hard drive replacements in all that time.
It seems to have gone to the great silicon scrapyard in the sky and I’ll need to get a replacement.
What I always loved about the BPI was that you could run a SATA drive from it. Looking at the web site, I think the latest version of the standard SBC is the M7. Is that right?
It looks like it supports M.2 drives, not SATA. If that is correct, can I do the same as with the M1 in that I can use the SD card simply to direct the system to the M.2 drive and then run everything from said M.2 drive?
And, very importatly, is there an off-the-shelf Linux distro for it?
If not, what is the best bet for me to replace my much-loved BPi M1 with something I can run Linux with a standard distro and use a SATA or M.2 drive with it?
The M7 is the latest and probably the most powerful board so far when it comes to general-purpose computing. However, it does not support SATA at all. So you need to transfer your files from the SATA disk to an M.2 NVMe drive (I don’t think M.2 SATA drives work), or use an USB-to-SATA cable. As for booting, the M7 has onboard eMMC (64G/128G) which can be flashed using a USB type-c cable. I recommend that over booting from NVMe (which I don’t know if it is supported) since it is easier to set up and separates system and user data.
Thanks, Andy, I appreciate it’s M.2, not SATA and that’s no big deal. I can happily copy data across to an M.2 Drive.
Booting off the eMMC sounds fine as long as we’re using the M.2 drive for all writing that goes on. I guess it will be possible to use the eMMC for nothing but initial boot just like with the SD card and the BP-M1
So, the one remaining question: Is Linux available for this board off the shelf?
I was amazed to find you can still buy BPi-M1 so I got another one to keep me going but like the idea of trying the M7.