I tested a straight xu4 with a usb3-sata jmicron chipset to and evo840 and found large sustained writes at about 120MB/s. I found that acceptable. I also connected them to WD 2T Red drives and maxed their write speed on sustained writes (powered the drives from an AT power supply -- coupling the ground to avoid dark current). I was and still am very pleased.
I purchased 3 HC1's and have not yet tested them for speed. I do find the heat aggregation when stacking them to be significant. Two of them are operating 1T SSHD and 1 has a T Evo. I'm (today -- day 2) adapting a fan to the back of the three units. I guess I could buy one more and buy the HK fan.
What can I say about the older chip set? No AES in hardware bugs me, but not too much since the cores don't do much while plain I/O occurs.
Couchdb runs nicely on odroids even with the limited memory, though I don't have huge databases; nonetheless, I am going to test sharding (v2+ Couch) across the three HC1's which act as a test cluster. I have a 2T Mongo DB on an intel box that is horribly abused and not used in the right way. It is dog slow because of poor design. I expect better performance backing it with odroids with couch for the specific application. I"ll use far less power over the ancient monster box 48 cores 128 GB ram with a small bank of odroids. Power is a problem in that we really need two larger redundant power supplies with barrel connectors (common ground) than a bunch of individual power supplies. The power selection at HK isn't ready for enterprise, but for a test cluster on dev boards it can't be beat. Maybe the final solution will move to AMD Opteron Arm based boards which can come in enterprise level configurations.
By the way, I have used an old U3 as my desktop for several years. I ssh to the big linux compute servers so why do I need anything else? Yes, office -- I RDP to a windows server for that.
Side note: the HK 4.9.y kernel is 4.9.44. Kernel.org updated 4.9.y to 4.9.45 a few days ago. You can get a patch to apply from kernel.org by: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/rawdiff/?id=v4.9.45&id2=v4.9.44&dt=0
Then cd to your root kernel build directory pulled from hardkernel github and switched to the right branch and apply the patch.
patch --strip 1 < patch_file
Enjoy these little hotrods.
uDude.
