Max HDD Size on USB / SATA Port with BPI-M3

Hi all,

i just want to know if I can fully access my 8 TB HDD (Seagate Archive) with the USB / SATA Interface.

It’s now connected via SATA to an old Banana PI, and this works fully. I CAN access fully the 8 TB HDD Seagate Archive, this is very fine! But the old Device is rather slow and i want to Upgrade to Your Edition.

So can you tell me if this works ? If you can’t test, just send me for testing your Device and I would do the Test and I would spread the Word in many Forums :smile:

Yours Andre

If it works with the M1 I am pretty sure it works with the M3.

As for the testing device I think the giveaway ends today. https://gleam.io/smtEz/banana-pi-bpim3-octacore-computer-give-away

yes, i wrote at all before that I have it already running with my M1, but i want to know if it will work with the new M3.

So I want to upgrade…

Any more Information ?

Sorry, I do not have a M3 nor a 8TB harddrive. I am pretty confident that the M3 can support it too.

You could test if you will have them .-)

See your own post:

So someone is giving me a 8TB drive?

Hopefully so.

It’s “nice” to see how the ‘official support’ for the Banana Pis is getting worse and worse…

According to your boss the M3 uses the horribly outdated GL830 USB-to-PATA/SATA bridge: http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/forum/advanced-users/993-banana-pi-bpi-m3-sample-have-test-ok-are-you-love-this-spec?start=6

No idea whether this still applies to the current test samples or the final product (it’s not even mentioned on the product page that the M3’s SoC isn’t SATA capable), no idea if you SinoVoip people have any clues about USB storage features like UASP (I doubt it), no idea whether the GL830 suffers from the usual 2 TB limitation of bridge chips that were produced back then and no idea what performance you can expect since according to Lion Wang the USB-to-SATA bridge is behind the internal USB hub. The only thing I know for sure is to avoid any of the new boards called “Banana Pi” since there exists no support any longer.

Compared to a BPi M1 the M3’s storage performance will be just a small fraction of what’s possible with the M1. If it’s about I/O performance then the number and speed of CPU cores doesn’t matter that much. The BPi M1’s A20 SoC with its native (and limited) SATA capabilities will easily outperform the M3 if it’s about NAS useage.

http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi_devices_as_NAS http://linux-sunxi.org/USB/UAS

I would wait whether the rumour Olimex spread back in July is true and Allwinner delivers a quad core version of the BPi M1’s A20 SoC in early 2016. Such an “A40” will be way more useful if you want to build a fileserver/NAS than the M3 with its crippled “USB 2.0 only USB-to-PATA/SATA bridge behind an internal USB hub” pseudo SATA connector.

The A20 is able to exceed 45/200 MB/s write/read via SATA. With the M3 you are limited to ~30 MB/s under best conditions. Since the USB-to-PATA/SATA bridge has to share bandwidth with other USB ports behind the internal hub things might get even worse if other bandwidth intensive USB peripherals are used.

Regarding the ‘integer performance’ of an A20 successor I interpolated benchmark results from a test I made a few weeks ago: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/325-orangepi-virgins/?p=2054

This is more or less meant to be a community support forum. At least its a good start despite the lack of ppl backing it. And I am not from a SinoVoip person, but rather a volunteer.

As said its nice that you pointed out the SATA thing with BPI M3. So you are saying the A20 came with SATA support directly from the SoC and the A83t does not.

Below is a A20 spec diagram. Is the SATA port somewhere under connectivity?

The specs under the A83t are below, 2x SPI, 4x TWI, 6x UART, RSB 3x SD/MMC HSIC 2x I2S/PCM CIR, LRADC

LOL, if you have a look at the ‘threads’ here http://forum.banana-pi.org/latest most of the stuff is copy&paste from the former ‘community support forum’ (LeMaker community – unfortunately they had to give up the Bananas and now no community any longer exists) or useless OS image release or announcements like which fair SinoVoip joined and so on.

And c’mon: You really doubt that the A20 lacks SATA since you didn’t find a reference on a picture? You should become familiar with the primary information source regarding the devices you sell:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page http://linux-sunxi.org/A20 http://linux-sunxi.org/Category:Devices_with_SATA_port

OMG, this is too weird for me…

Lol. Allwinner stuff is just as confusing. That picture came straight from Allwinner so it is indeed a “Primary Source”

Well I think most things on this forum are just news and image releases. Where did you find copy paste stuff?

The day before yesterday – as usual from LeMaker’s forum: [Bananian] Tutorial: How to use CAN BUS on BananaPi with Bananian

And this is the majority of contents, only copy&paste from somewhere else, just do a google search for lemaker forum site:forum.banana-pi.org

It’s really annoying since some marketing guy trying to flood this forum here with contents inserts really old/outdated contents from time to time. But otherwise there would be nothing at all since user questions aren’t answered appropriately here (this thread being a good example).

Fine. True. I couldn’t have answered the question.

But at least give credit for the nice forum software by Discourse and the nice Material UI :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Being honest, this forum looks better than other forums.

So, in my conclusion is nobody here from the developer stuff to answer my quistion correctly, right ? maybe you can contact the dev team ?

From the customer view is this the official forum, and you should find a way to answer my question.

pls, folks don’t talk about hot or not, i just want them to answer my question.

thanks

I will contact the dev team about it to see if they have answers about the SATA support on M3.

Update: the USB 2.0 to SATA converting module is used on the M3.

So if you are looking for a NAS, the M1 is still your best bet.

Which “converting module” do you use? It’s unbelievable that the M3 is being marketed as “SATA capable” while it’s not, it’s also unbelievable that such informations aren’t part of the ‘specifications’ somewhere and that people have to ask the very same questions over and over again.

There exist so many different USB-to-SATA bridges with different performance and feature sets so it’s necessary to know which one a specific product uses. If Lion Wang’s thread answer in the other horrible forum is still right then we’re speaking about the GL830 (not fully SAT capable, no UASP support, bad performance and maybe also a 2 TB limitation since the chip is rather old)

If the GL830 is used on the M3 (and noone knows outside SinoVoip) then the stuff you can read about the Orange Pi Plus also applies to the M3 for example regarding reading out SMART and disk information: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=366

But you have to keep in mind that on the Orange Pi Plus the GL830 is directly connected to one of the H3’s USB ports while on the M3 it has to share bandwidth with other USB ports since it’s behind a hub. So the bad performance figures you find for the Orange Pi Plus will be even worse with M3.

thanks.

you’ll know my next question ?

WHICH converting module is used ?

And please, take there infomations to the specs pages :smile: if you can’t the marketing will do :smile:

thanks

btw: the M1 hat a SATA Port AND an USB Port, but just on the SATA Port my 8 TB HDD is completely recognised. on the usb the M1 will just recognise 2 or 4 GB. But HDD’s are still growing, the next will be a 16 TB hdd, becase a 12 is already available.

This has nothing to do with the M1 but only with the USB-to-SATA bridges used in the USB enclosures you tested. From the three bridge chips i listed here http://linux-sunxi.org/USB/UAS#Testing_3_different_external_enclosures both the ASM1051 and the JMS567 are able to access HDDs larger than 4 TB. So the chipset matters. And unfortunately SinoVoip relies on a really outdated chip on the M3

thank for your info about the chips and the M1, but pls let them first answer my question about the M3 :smile: otherwise we are going to loose us in diskussions :frowning:

thank you

Who are they? The ‘volunteer’ called projectbananapi not being from SinoVoip and doubting the A20 has native SATA? :wink:

Have a look at the ‘specs’: SATA(up to 2TB). So these ‘specs’ seem to confirm the words of SinoVoip’s CEO Lion Wang: They use the GL830 or something similar crappy. You can use just 25 percent of your Seagate and the storage performance of the M3 will be only a fraction of the M1’s.

And the funny thing is: Unlike with the M1 or M2 where you can use mainline kernel now and UASP you’re simply lost with the M3 since there is only a horribly outdated kernel 3.4.39 available and mainlining efforts just started. So you’ve to rely on the old and slow USB BOT mode even if you would use an external USB-to-SATA bridge instead of the crappy onboard GL830. :slight_smile: