I wonder how these two boards and the support offerings will stack up?
I am reviewing both for publication. The M3 has that awesome SATA port, no fan, and it appears like some good OS support is in the works.
The ODROID-XU4 looks to be very fast, with a wide variety of add off modules, but perhaps shy in OS support.
I will say that hardkernel.com (ODROID’s main page) has a first class user forum, website, and an awsome monthy magazine (worth reading even if you are not a ODROID customer), published in two languages.
No offense, but the forums here do not even a qualify as third rate net citizens, and I question the ability to get accurate answers [here] spoken in broken three word english sentences.
I love the Banana Pi (really - I do), but I wonder if the folks representing here could do a better job of, well, representing the product.
Are you kidding? The M3’s SoC has no SATA. There’s a GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge on the board behind an internal USB hub. The most crappy approach ever. The SinoVoip people here aren’t able to answer the question if this old chip (from 2007) is limited to 2 TB or not. They are not able to answer such simple questions because they do not give a sh*t regarding anything beyond soldering components on a PCB.
Now they decided to choose the crappy Micro-USB connector to power the board. Totally insane.
And what are you talking about “good OS support”?! The A83T SoC has exactly zero support from community. There will be an outdated kernel 3.4 from Allwinner and that’s all. Software situation is far worse than compared to the M2 where community members wrote drivers for mainline kernel from scratch and also a correct hardware description (ZERO contributions from the manufacturer, they’re even to ignorant to exchange their broken device tree stuff with the working one from the community)
Alsmost everything a cheap SBC can provide depends on the SoC in question. The A20 has somewhat limited SATA capabilities (write performance limited to 40-45 MB/s for yet unknown reasons), the A83T has no SATA and no mainline kernel support and SinoVoip uses an old USB2-to-SATA/PATA bridge. Given they would use something reasonable and not the GL830 and given that there would be mainline kernel support for the SoC used (both not true) you would be able to reach 40/40 MB/s read/write: http://linux-sunxi.org/USB/UAS
But there is no UAS support due to missing mainline kernel support (I suppose it will never happen that the A83T will be fully supported since this SoC isn’t worth a look) and the GL830 is a bad choice (the Orange Pi Plus also uses the same bridge and performance numbers are really bad: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=286 and they will be even worse on the M3 since there the chip is behind an internal USB hub!)
The XU4 has USB3.0 and is able to reach 150 MB/s, so in reality that’s 5 to 6 times faster than the M3’s USB2-to-SATA implementation.
