Jason Law

That would explain why your upload is faster. I wonder if this board could saturate a gigabit link with a faster hard drive.

Are you using an SSD or HDD? Because if that's a 2.5" HDD you are likely hitting the max write speed of the disk.

I bought an Asrock Deskmini 310W, makes for a nice NAS solution, not really a SBC though.

It's very possible as the board can be powered from the 5v pin and a ground.

I'm fairly new to SBCs in general but I was under the impression that the Odroid XU4 is using software accelerated decoding of H264 and straight up can't do H265, which is why many people go for the Odroid C2 for media playback as it has a dedicated hardware decoding chip for H264. My experience in Chrome (after installing additional plugins) is that 720P runs quite smoothly as long as running full screen with no adds or anything else popping up (like the volume control button when you hit the volume keys on your keyboard, or advertisments). Otherwise other elements on the screen can cause tearing and poor playback. Chromium Youtube at 1080P is very low framerate and absolutely unplayable. Kodi is mostly usable up to 1080P but high action scenes where a large number of pixels are replaced from frame to frame playback at a very low frame rate. My first board was not the Q model, the fan was rediculously loud and the board was defective. The RMA process through Ameridroid was terrible and ended up needlessly costing me an extra ~20USD. As this is their US distributor I would like to avoid Ameridroid and Odroid altogether. Despite these annoyances the board is getting the job done well enough, but I'm included to get an RK3399 board for my home media server for fluid playback and use my Odroid as a board to tinker with.

I have 2 primary needs, Media playback and NAS. My current board is the Odroid XU4Q is unfortunately not living up to my expectations but it's been a good learning process. It has problems with thermal throttling and does not have hardware decoding for H264/H265 so I get tearing and low framerates even at 1080P. Youtube is 720P. I also had issues with UAS protocols and had to disable it on my USB3.0 attached HDD. (This has more to do with my USB to SATA cable than anything else). After a fair bit of research I've decided on the RK3399 SoC. RockPro64: Too big for my liking. Due to thermal issues most people run it at 1.8Ghz big and 1.4Ghz small. I also really don't like that you need a PCIe expansion board for SATA. There have been a lot of issues on the forums for this board, especially with the SATA expansion board. NanoPC-T4 I can't find much info about using the M.2 M-Key with a SATA expansion board. Only report I found of someone trying this said due to the positioning of some components their board shorted. No board released directly by FriendlyElec for this purpose so drivers will also be an issue. RK3399 SoC on the top of board so likely thermal issues. NanoPi-M4 Checks off all the boxes nicely. Great heatsinks, 4xUSB3.0 and there's a HAT in development with 4 SATA ports and 2 Molex ports. I love the form factor, it has great reviews, the price is reasonable. With a small fan you can even overclock it slightly. NanoPi Neo4 Could maybe work for me if they make a SATA HAT like they have for the M4, otherwise existing connectivity ports are inadequate. Also 1GB Ram is a little lean. I would still love one of these down the road to tinker on. ODROID N1 Cancelled, otherwise this would have been a strong contender. It has on board SATA support and a large community to back it up. Still waiting to see what Odroids going to come up with next. Other Manufacturers of RK3399 boards. The older RK3399 boards all seem to be more expensive, lacking in SATA options and cap at 2GB RAM. None of them really caught my attention. X86 boards like UDOO and LattePanda Too expensive for what they were offering. Less power efficient.

I would probably buy the board that best meets your use case and expect that the Friendly Elec and Pine64 board are all newly released and may have some quirks that will be sorted out eventually.

Any idea when this HAT will be out? I plan to get one as my NAS board.

Awesome, now I just need the SATA HAT for the M4 to be released and I can make my order.

I would also love to know when this is planned for release. I would like a NanoPi-M4 and a NanoPi Neo4 but I'd rather order them together to save on shipping and import. Also what is the planned price point for this unit?

Any idea when this HAT will be released? Price point? Will there be a Male 40 pin connector on it? Will this HAT be usable with an eMMC module in the eMMC slot right underneath it? This HAT is really the number 1 selling point for me right now. Looks way more usable than the Rockpro64 SATA setup. On a different note regarding the heat sink, are you better off with a fan blowing from the top down? Or from the side for heat dissipation?

This is perfect. I much prefer the layout and heat sink option for the M4 anyways. I'm very new to this sort of thing but how will this connect to the M4?

Has anyone tried a 2 or 4 port SATA controller in the M.2 slot? Does it work? What is the most streamlined way to run power to 3.5" drives in this setup?