A new (and better?) kid on the block?

Haha - perhaps the next one will be called Heliotrope Pi.

The board looks interesting - some definite enhancements compared to the Raspbery Pi, and for a similar price. Shipping from China looks quite slow.

IIRC there are a few of these competitors to the Raspberry Pi. I wonder if the competition will affect spec or price of the Pi we know and love.

James

Perhaps the one killer interface is the SATA one?

That depends how it (and the Gbit Ethernet) are attached - if they're hanging off the USB hub then it's nothing that couldn't be done with a RPi. It might have been more useful to build in Bluetooth and WiFi. I wonder how much the extra bits affect power requirements.

...

As for whether that is a killer or not I don't know. I suppose like all these things the SATA port is brilliant if you need it and unnecessary if you don't.

Would you add a SATA drive? If so, what for?

From what I saw it looked as though the SATA drive would be powered from the Orange Pi, which was a little surprising given the presumed current required to spin a drive - but welcome, if true. IIRC the input power was 5V at 2A.

I confess I could do with seeing a table of the Raspberry Pi models and various similar machines alongside each other for comparison. If I had a suitable web site I would add a page to it. (I do have update access to some web sites but such a comparison table would not fit content-wise.)

James

Seem to be dedicated SATA and Ethernet controllers on the PCB, still doesn't prove they're not hanging off a USB controller I suppose

There's a Wifi antenna connector on board (H3 spec sheet implies it's SDIO connected) no mention of bluetooth though.

Wikipedia has comparison tables for certain microprocessors:

A similar comparison table for fruit Pi machines would seem to be as appropriate.

--
Robert Riches 
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net 
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

There is this at least:

--
Torfinn Ingolfsen, 
Norway

IME those large Wikipedia comparison tables have some shortcomings:

1. They are too comprehensive making it difficult to focus on the items you want to see.
2. They are not database driven, making it impossible to reduce the sizes of the tables by selecting the attributes you want to see.

The Specifications table at

is much better. In fact it's better than any I have seen elsewhere even on raspberrypi.org.

James

Vastly faster and more reliable I/O.

SD cards may have high headline transfer speeds for large sequential transfers by they are far slower than a modest laptop drive for the small random transfers which you get when using them as the primary disc for an OS.

SD cards are also quite unreliable, and often fail catastrophically without notice when used as primary storage. They have far less sophisticated write buffering an wear levelling than an SSD.

I'd probably put a cheap small SSD on for the OS, and a large spinning rust drive to use as a NAS.

---druck

On Sun, 13 Sep 2015 12:37:46 +0100, druck declaimed the following:

This would be the place to point out that Class 10 cards are rated explicitly for large single streaming transfers (video written to a freshly formatted card). Class 6/4/2 cards are still rated on smaller fragmented I/O (still image cameras with some images deleted, MP3 music files). While I would hope the top brand class 10 cards manage a class 6 (or at least 4) response on fragmented conditions, there is no promise of such.

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

I'm not clear on how that is a worst performance than a rotating hard drive. When you have random access on a hard drive the seek time dominates the performance. On writes this can be mitigated by a large buffer, but that won't work for all combinations. For reads, random accesses are the worst for a rotating drive. Performance drops like a rock.

--

Rick

The fast streaming performance is partly due to using very large page sizes.

When you write to a hard disk you can easily write one sector (512 or

4096 bytes) at a time.

On an SD card you may have page sizes in the MB ranges and even to write

4096 bytes means reading that x MB block into a buffer (in the SD card controller), erasing the whole block, then writing in the new contents. So that's three operations instead of the one that the disk needs - and erasing/writing is slow on flash media.