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Hello, Looks like meanwhile the M3 entered a matured state , at least from " compile.sh " menu - did not notice till recent. Anyway was wondering if things improved running kernel 5.8 and onwards , mainly in terms of " A83T chip isn’t SATA capable and therefore the SATA port is provided by a (very) slow GL830 USB-to-SATA-bridge " So therefore still worth buying a separate USB-to-SATA bridge if you want to connect a hard disk? bummer it is "just" 2.0 but what to expect as board is being produced from somewhere 2015 I believe. In terms of octa core systems ( 1,8Ghz ) this looks still a nice pick

Hi, I've been using armbian in combination with openmediavault for the last years to access my files on an 1TB HDD. Today I wanted to upgrade the drive to a 3 TB one, but it just shows a capacity 746GB. Is there a size limit on the GL830 for harddrives or why isn't the real capacity showing up? fdisk-l: Disk /dev/sda: 746.5 GiB, 801569724416 bytes, 1565565868 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Thanks in advance Regards, Joshua

It works but a chip quality and speed is bad. Put GL830 into a search box above. It is noted hardware (quality) issue which has nothing to do with out work. All images and kernels share this problem. Perhaps we would need to use different wording to make this more clear.

Suptronics/Geekworm sells RPi add-ons for a long time. They started with an add-on using the crappy/slow GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge but switched to a good JMS578 after some public complaints (see there also for the issues with GL830) Now they offer a metal box with fan kit and for their X830 USB-to-SATA board for less than 30 bucks. Power input: 14 to 40V DC via 5.5/2.5mm power barrel jack, the SBC can then be powered through GPIO header pins. Boards that should fit inside the enclosure: Any RPi Libre Computer Tritium H2+/H3/H5 Libre Computer Le Potato MiQi NanoPi K1 Plus NanoPi K2 ODROID C1/C1+ ODROID C2 Tinkerboard Rock64 Libre Computer Renegade PineH64 B NanoPi M4 (sufficient cooling will require mounting the fan not on top but next to the board) Caveats: With the 4 last boards you can either limit connection between board and the SATA-bridge to USB2 (the small adapter only transports the Hi-Speed data lines) or you need a standards violating USB3-A to USB3-A cable (which is said to be included with X830 -- no idea if it's also part of the kit). I'm not sure how a 3.5" HDD is mounted inside the enclosure and expressed my concerns about this and potential firmware issues (as well as how to solve them) with the X830 only here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/06/12/add-a-3-5-hard-drive-raspberry-pi-suptronics-x830-add-on-board/#comment-554303 (there you also find some more information and link to a wiki). Disclaimer: never used any of their products and not able to 'review' anything. I just thought this would be a nice combination if a 3.5" HDD should be used together with one of the supported SBC since usually 3.5" HDDs needing 5V and 12V at the same time is somewhat challenging. Edit: Just realized that it's only the enclosure + fan and you need to buy the X830 board separately. Then we're talking about a pretty expensive gadget which will be kinda ugly too with USB3 equipped boards since it needs an 80cm USB cable to externally connect SBC and disk inside the enclosure. Too bad.

Sure, 'the Allwinner syndrome'. Once the SoC is EOL and can not be purchased any more the brave souls over at linux-sunxi finished mainline kernel support. Situation 3-4 years ago was different but today I really have no clue why to waste a single second on anything Allwinner that is not also cheap as hell (talking about the small OPi and NanoPi boards) or makes good use of Allwinner's battery support (PineBook, Olimex' Teres, Olimex Lime/Lime2 boards that use the battery to provide full 'UPS functionality' since also powering USB and SATA devices via step up converters) Banana Pi M3 with its outdated 32-bit Cortex-A7 little cores and the totally unsupported PowerVR GPU is even more expensive than faster little.LITTLE designs like NanoPi Fire3 or even true big.LITTLE designs like ODROID XU4/HC1/HC2 (the latter also with an USB-to-SATA bridge but USB3 based and more than 25 times faster than the crappy GL830 on the M3).

If we would ever start to develop this kind of stuff from the right starting point (the user perspective) we would immediately get that there are two different use cases for the download page: pre purchase: user wants to buy a new board based on certain criteria (both hardware and software related, the latter eg. kernel support). Here user expectations and selection criteria are important. From a user perspective it's again not about 'SATA' but 'fast storage' and we do really no good job advertising GL830 boards as 'fast storage' boards (which we DO when looking at the download page from a user and not biased techie perspective) post purchase: user holds board in his hands, wants to download the appropriate OS image for his device. In this case filtering for board names -- ODROID, Banana, Orange, Nano -- would be nice (but by switching to 'name based' sort which no one ever does since it's hidden on the page instead of being directly above the individual board links this could already be achieved). And it would also be great if the names on the download page would be the real ones so differentiation is more easy. It's replacing the + sign with the five characters ' Plus' (expect for ODROID C1+ where it's not necessary). There's a huge difference between 'Orange Pi Zero+' and 'Orange Pi Zero Plus' especially with default sort order (date of added support) As soon as we would switch perspective and ask what's needed from a user perspective and not doing what's ALWAYS WRONG and NEVER WORKS (puzzling together some technical details and make some of them available for whatever reasons in a weird fashion) all these questions would already be obsolete. Seriously the buttons on top are overloaded with confusing stuff and itself ordered in a way that make them totally useless. Eg. there's a button 'm2' (should be 'M.2' instead!) that appears between 'legacy' and 'mainline' due to alphabetical order for no reason. Useless.

Nope, they sort it by popularity or whatever (Pine64 at the top and ROCK64 at the bottom for example) and try to group by board names (eg. putting LeMaker's Banana Pro and SinoVoip's BPi M2+ in one section while both are totally incompatible -- same problem also with NanoPis). Doing so is HIGHLY MISLEADING since not brands are important but the technical base. A NanoPi NEO 2 and a NanoPi M3 are from two different worlds while a NEO 2 and an Orange Pi Zero Plus are almost the same (especially when Armbian is running on them it will be very hard to spot any difference in usage and performance!) If people search on the download page they search for features. If they're absolutely clueless we can't help them anyway. If we want to guide people a little bit we have to stop what we're doing now (focused on technical details) and start to get into the heads of our users (what are they interested in? And are these the correct reasons? Again 'SATA': Not the existence of a small port with 7 pins to connect a SATA cable to is relevant but what users associate with this. And on boards we list as what they consider the label for 'fast storage' they get just insanely slow and broken GL830 USB-SATA crap). Seriously: people looking for the NAS use case click on GbE, click on SATA, check the boards, think 'the more DRAM the better', think 'the more CPU cores the better', weigh some features and end up buying an Orange Pi Plus 2 instead of an ODROID-XU4 (which is magnitudes faster as NAS but is not even considered since users think 'SATA is better than USB3'). What we do here is highly misleading and must stop.

And both are WRONG! That's the problem. Better no information than misleading/wrong information. Unless this categorization can be edited/reviewed by us (eg. part of board config files) I would really prefer to stop 'advertising' wrong features. mSATA: the Hummingboard has no mSATA but mPCIe only, same with the Clearfogs by default: you need to rebuild u-boot and have to freeze the packages to get reliable mSATA/SATA on the mPCIe slot(s) SATA: This category is totally worthless if boards with crap SATA like the Orange Pi Plus and Plus 2 are listed here too. People look after SATA since they associate 'fast storage' with this. This is already wrong with those A20 boards but it gets bizarre when we're talking about the crappy GL830. And the only boards with real fast SATA -- not on mSATA slots but M.2 slot with key type B -- are missing here Again: user perspective. The features listed there should match user expectations (and that's fast storage and not 'technically a SATA port is on the board even if it's crap'). Just another part of the same problem...

Doesn't work. If I today click on SATA I get a list of boards ranging from crappy USB-SATA (GL830 on Orange Pi Plus 2) over crappy native SATA (Allwinner A20) over mediocre native SATA (i.MX6) to nice USB-SATA (ODROID HC1) while the only devices that feature great native SATA (Clearfogs) are missing.

Crap, mmc info is missing there (please search for mmc2:0001 here to get the idea how it should look like), seems I've to adjust armhwinfo for latest mainline kernel. At least it's confirmed that you're testing on ext4 (no compression) and it's as expected: the eMMC now used shows dog slow write performance (12.5MB/s max). Xunlong switched to another eMMC variant in the meantime The only good news: random IO is somewhat ok-ish so as soon as you use the eMMC for the OS and attach an USB2 disk (avoiding the crappy GL830 'SATA port') to store data you should be able to get ~37 MB/s now and maybe ~40MB/s in a few weeks (when Armbian provides THS/DVFS for H3 boards running mainline kernel)

There is no SATA port on this board, just the most crappy USB-to-SATA bridge currently known (called GL830 and even being broken since eating your last two sectors of any disk). When you forget about this 'SATA port' the best you could get are ~40MB/s with an external USB disk enclosure that makes use of UAS (see link). Onboard eMMC should be fast (40/80MB/s sequential write/read). Please see http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi_devices_as_NAS#Benchmarking_.2F_Identifying_bottlenecks and use iozone and iperf3 to test storage/network locally. No idea which OS image you use but at least 12MB/s write should be possible writing to a 'SATA attached' disk, +30MB/s with an USB2 attached disk and maybe +50MB/s when writing to the eMMC (SD card has it's own limits, explained here)

The problem with this M3 is that situation there is even worse due to the used USB-to-SATA bridge: GL830 is slow as hell and also buggy: https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comments In my opinion boards with this GL830 should neither be bought nor supported by open source projects (like Armbian) but for whatever (historical) reasons Armbian supports Xunlong's Orange Pi Plus and 'Plus 2' which use the same crappy USB-to-SATA bridge (though there the USB situation is not as worse as with BPi M3 where the engineers forgot that they could've used the SoC's other USB port to connect the SATA bridge --> on BPi M3 all USB peripherals and a connected 'SATA' disk fight for bandwidth since all being behind the same internal USB2 hub while the SoC's second USB port is unused). IMO a really bad idea. Those proprietary RAID boxes are just a huge single point of failure and I would never rely on such things (but I do storage for a living and only deal with RAID any more when it failed so I'm a bit biased here). Wrt performance: ROCK64 is limited by Gigabit Ethernet, real world throughput with Windows Explorer or macOS Finder will be around or even above 100 MB/s (megabyte) given the USB3 attached storage is fast enough.

Oops, overread it totally. The BPi M3 is most probably the worst choice for a Gigabit Ethernet equipped board with NAS use case in mind since featuring the broken/slow GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge which has to share bandwidth with all the USB2 receptacles since the 'famous' board maker ignored that the A83T SoC has 2 USB ports but they use only one to connect both GL830 and the internal USB hub where the other USB ports are connected to. http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi_devices_as_NAS#Requirements_.2F_which_device_to_choose http://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3#USB_2.0_Hosts

Nope, this is not SATA here but the most crappy USB to SATA bridge found on any device. Please do a web search for 'crappy GL830' for details. Of course not, boards with GL830 aren't suitable for NAS purposes and should be avoided.

One final update regarding Roseapple Pi (using Actions Semi S500 just like LeMaker Guitar or the announced Cubieboard 6). Since I booted the board one last time anyway I thought let's give USB3 there also one last try. I connected a Samsung PM851 in an JMS567 enclosure (with own power supply!) to the USB3 port and had a look with most recent 3.10.105 kernel: root@roseapple:~# lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 152d:3562 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub root@roseapple:~# lsusb -t /: Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 5000M |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M /: Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci-hcd/1p, 480M That looks nice since UAS seems to be useable. Let's give it a try with the 2 iozone calls from Clearfog measurements above: iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 random random kB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 102400 4 13525 16451 19141 24275 14287 16492 102400 16 39343 48649 56409 63777 40203 45654 102400 512 68873 75835 89871 102977 98620 94677 102400 1024 115288 111747 170742 176837 172585 104936 102400 16384 117025 105977 195316 196457 196582 117819 iozone -a -g 4000m -s 4000m -i 0 -i 1 -r 4K -r 1024K kB reclen write rewrite read reread 4096000 4 124421 132386 134795 134760 4096000 1024 127135 134943 127559 128026 If you compare with PM851 numbers made with Clearfog above it's obvious that S500 numbers are not that great. And since S500 features only Fast Ethernet at least for NAS use cases sequential transfer speeds are irrelevant anyway. I tried then to use an external VIA812 USB3 hub with integrated RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet but this only led to error messages, /dev/sda1 disappearing and the board failing to boot afterwards. Fortunately this Roseapple Pi (formerly called Lemon Pi more correctly) has never been sold. There exist just a few dev/review samples that were sent out around the globe. Maybe the above numbers help some future Cubieboard 6 owners who got tricked into believing CB6 would have 'real SATA' Funnily USB-SATA on Cubieboard 6 will be much faster than on older Cubieboards (using A20's 'real SATA' or the horrible GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge on Cubieboard 5) but for most use cases this won't help much since there's only Fast Ethernet on the board. So even when adding a RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet dongle to one of the 2 USB2 ports 'NAS performance' won't exceed that of Cubieboard 3 (the so called Cubietruck)

Most probably not. Orange Pi Plus 2 has no SATA, just a crappy/broken/ultra-slow USB-to-SATA catastrophe called GL830: http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comments

For me the internal forum search is close to unusable unfortunately. In case you want to waste any time on this board you better check wens' work (linux-sunxi community, AFAIK he's the only one in this world still working on H8/A83T boards, at least I've not seen that much from Vishnu the last 4 months). With Armbian your best starting point is the bananapim3.wip file since both boards share most design flaws and H8 and A83T are the same anyway. Edit: I hope you don't like this board due to its 'SATA port'? Since it's not SATA, it's slow as hell and also broken. GL830 swallows your data if it's at the end of a disk: http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comments

Thanks! That's the USB2.0 part of a Genesys Logic GL3520. I wrote above of ' VL812 (Rev B2 or newer recommended)' BTW: Genesys Logic is also the creator of the most crappy USB-to-SATA bridge known: http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/03/16/suptronics-x800-2-5-sata-drive-expansion-board-and-cases-for-raspberry-pi-23-and-odroid-c2-boards/#comment-540247 (GL830 is not only slow as hell but also broken! But still used on new gadgets and also present on some SBC that should be avoided for that reason alone) Edit: Maybe I should elaborate on that? All that really matters in some electronic gadgets is the chipset(s) used. As it's exactly the case with Hub+Ethernet combos. IMO a great way to get the right gadget is to do a google search for '8153 via812 site:amazon.com' in this case since you find only products listed that mention the chipsets (sometimes in comments/reviews only then you should be careful since then the manufacturer might replace the chip(s) in a new product revision without notice!) reviews/ratings you can read through (the only real advantage using Amazon IMO) even a manufacturer/seller you might start to trust in. I for example discovered by accident that I shopped a lot of stuff from the same german 'manufacturer'within the last 2 or 3 years. It seems they focus on choosing quality ingredients, import the stuff from China and sell them with useful product descriptions and documentation through Amazon oder eBay -- example (but no recommendation, I don't have this device)

H2+/H3/H5 boards overview (2017/03 update) Since it has been a while since this topic has been updated and a lot of new boards have been released in the meantime it's time for a new overview. I'll add also H2+ and H5 based boards since in the meantime we learned that those SoCs are pin-to-pin compatible and recently vendors started to simply exchange H3 with H5 on some PCB (and vice versa in at least one occurence). From a software point of view H5 is quite different (using 64-bit Cortex-A53 CPU cores and ARMv8 instruction set, some early boot stages are also totally different compared to Cortex-A7/ARMv7 used in H3 and H2+) and it should also be noted that Armbian currently only provides OS images based on mainline kernel for H5 boards (so please forget about HW accelerated video decoding or 3D for now or maybe ever since none of the developers is in the mood to deal with Allwinner's BSP/legacy kernel for H5 (regarding 'BSP' just look above in post #2). While software support for H5 is currently somewhat different hardware features are pretty much the same as with H3 (still 3 to 4 real USB2 host ports and one USB2 OTG port: a simple register setting can switch the Micro USB port's PHY between the so called 'musb' controller used for OTG and a real EHCI/OHCI controller pair: with mainline kernel it will soon be possible to switch OTG to a real 4th USB2 host port with full feature set that still has not to share bandwidth with any of the other USB ports). CPU performance with H5 compared to H3 is slightly higher at the same clockspeed but some workloads that benefit from either 64-bit or ARMv8 instruction set are significantly faster (eg. software making use of NEON instructions might perform almost twice as fast and the best example is the stupid 'sysbench' CPU pseudo benchmark which shows over 10 times better scores on the same hardware when compiled with ARMv8 settings). In the following list I will also introduce some subjective 'categories' to deal better with the huge amount of boards we can use in the meantime: NAS category: these are the H3/H5 boards with Gigabit Ethernet IoT category: these are the small and cheap boards best suited for low consumption 'General purpose' category: all the other H3 devices, these are also those you should look for if you want a cheap device to run with X11, OpenELEC, RetrOrangePi or Lakka since they all feature HDMI and full legacy kernel support As already said the differentiation is subjective and partially misleading since new boards like NanoPi NEO 2 featuring Gigabit Ethernet are also that inexpensive, small and energy efficient that they could serve both as NAS and IoT nodes (actually you can somewhat control behaviour since GbE vs. Fast Ethernet makes a pretty huge difference in consumption so it's up to you). Boards that might fit in multiple categories are listed more than once to make comparisons more simple if you're only interested in a specific device category: NAS category (only due to Gigabit Ethernet available): Banana Pi M2+: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT Banana Pi M2+ EDU: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable NanoPi M1 Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT NanoPi M1 Plus 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi OrangePi PC 2: H5, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable OrangePi PC Prime: H5, 2GB DRAM, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT OrangePi Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi OrangePi Plus 2: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB fast eMMC, 1+4 USB ports useable (hub), Wi-Fi OrangePi Plus 2E: H3, 2GB DRAM, 16GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi IoT category (cheap, small, energy efficient, most of them headless): NanoPi Air: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet NanoPi NEO: H3, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet NanoPi NEO 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Gigabit Ethernet NanoPi NEO Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet OrangePi Zero: H2+, 256/512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H5, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+0+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet but HDMI General purpose (HDMI and full legacy kernel support: video/3D HW accelerated): Beelink X2: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB slow eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet NanoPi M1: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet OrangePi Lite: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, no Ethernet OrangePi One: H3, 512MB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+1 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet OrangePi PC: H3, 1GB DRAM, no eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Fast Ethernet OrangePi PC Plus: H3, 1GB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+3 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet OrangePi Zero Plus 2: H3, 512MB DRAM, 8GB fast eMMC, 1+1+2 USB ports useable, Wi-Fi/BT, no Ethernet pcDuino Nano 4: See above, it's just an OEM version of NanoPi M1 done for Linksprite Some important notes: The following boards are listed in more than 1 category due to advanced feature mix: NanoPi NEO 2, NanoPi NEO Plus 2 and OrangePi Zero Plus 2 H3/H5 CE/FCC certifications: Please check individually and don't trust in logos silkscreened on the PCB, even if it looks like 'CE' it might mean 'China Export' instead IO bandwidth: H2+/H3/H5 SoC features 3+1 USB2 ports but on a few boards an internal USB hub is used so while these expose more USB receptacles some ports have to share bandwidth. Also on these boards a buggy/slow GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge is used. Search for 'hub' above to identify them. eMMC: shows most of the times higher random IO performance compared to 'the average SD card', but some vendors use pretty slow eMMC on their boards (Xunlong being the exception with OPi PC Plus, Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E and Zero Plus 2). Please do not overestimate eMMC -- there's no need to choose crappy/slow SD cards and if you follow the usual recommendations difference in performance varies not that much (for example eMMC on most boards shows pretty low sequential write speeds that will be easily outperformed by any good SD card and differences in random IO don't have to be that huge, simply watch out for SD cards showing A1 or even A2 logo) USB ports: Some of the IoT devices have two of the SoC's USB host ports available on a pin header to be used with soldering or combined with various Docks, HATs or 'Expansion boards' (search for '1+1+2' above). On OPi One/Lite the unexposed USB host ports are available at pretty tiny solder pads so only usable with a lot of soldering experience Wi-Fi/BT: all boards providing both Wi-Fi and BT rely on Ampak's AP6212 so performance is identical, the Wi-Fi only boards either rely on RTL8189ETV/8189FTV (slightly better Wi-Fi performance than AP6212) or Allwinner's XR819 (so expect low Wi-Fi performance with OPi Zero or NEO Plus 2 since implementation is low-end and currently driver sucks) Yeah, each vendor's naming scheme totally sucks. Partially there are rules involved (the 'Plus' then means eMMC with Xunlong or GBit Ethernet with FriendlyELEC... mostly) but please don't trust in and check always individually! And now another few words on a different technical detail affecting both performance and thermal behaviour of the various boards: Voltage regulation / DVFS. TL;DR: the SoC can be fed with a variable voltage (VDD_CPUX), the lower the voltage the lower the temperature (less problems with heat/overheating), the higher the voltage the higher the maximum CPU clockspeed. So the best idea is to adjust this dynamically (low voltage/clockspeed when idle and only increasing both when needed). There are 3 variants to implement this: not at all, primitive or advanced (using a voltage regulator that's able to adjust VDD_CPUX in 20mV steps) Only 3 devices implement no voltage regulation at all: Banana Pi M2+/EDU (frying the SoC constantly at 1.3V therefore prone to overheating), Beelink X2 (no idea) and NEO 2 (only 1.1V therefore limited to 1008MHz cpufreq max since above instabilities might occur). Some boards use SY8106A I2C accessible voltage regulator where we can use fine grained voltage settings (Armbian fine-tuned these for every board so far to achieve max performance). This applies only to the following Xunlong boards: OPi PC, PC Plus, PC 2, PC 3, Plus, Plus 2 and Plus 2E. All other boards implement a simple two voltage scheme and are able to switch between 1.1V (up to 912MHz possible with H2+/H3 or 1008MHz with H5) or 1.3V (1.2GHz max with H2+/H3 and 1.25GHz with H5) And finally to add some stupid rankings: the cheapest board is from Xunlong (Orange Pi Zero: $7), the fastest is from Xunlong (Orange Pi PC 2 for $20) and the one with best feature set and onboard peripherals is also from Xunlong (Orange Pi Plus 2E: $35). And that's only due to OrangePi PC 3 Prime still not being released at the time of this writing (since otherwise regarding both performance and features this specific Xunlong board... ) Hope that helps Edit: OPi 3 is now known as OPi Prime and (almost) nothing has changed compared to the leaked pictures back from last August.

According to https://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_Plus#SATA this should work, if you provide sufficient power of good quality. There seems to be no 2TB limit mentioned in the gl830 sata bridge datasheet here: http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/207044/GENESYS/GL830.html best, gnasch

The board has no SATA, just the slowest USB-to-SATA bridge in the world: GL830. This chip is also broken: https://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi/2016-06-27#16843360; Broken and slow as hell: simply avoid the SATA connector on boards that use this crappy IC (applies to Orange Pi Plus, Banana Pi M3 and H8 based "Cubietruck Plus" too) or simply avoid those boards using such a crappy "storage solution".

When you did the upgrade, simply reboot and provide the output of 'sudo armbianmonitor -u' afterwards here (I'm especially curious whether the version will be shown since when I ran into update troubles /etc/armbian-release was missing). If I understood correctly you won't loose that much in case update fails since you would then start over with a fresh 5.20 image? Regarding web server use case please take some time and read through posts #1 and #6 here. IMO the best option would be to use mainline/vanilla kernel and btrfs with activated file compression. But yet no OS images available (I've made one but without thermal throttling so I won't share) since we have to wait a bit until Ethernet and dvfs/throttling patches are accepted upstream. But on Orange Pis with eMMC the best place to put the OS on is always there. And in case amount of data allows it I would better choose a 64 GB Samsung EVO than any HDD at the moment (but this is also somewhat tricky to boot from eMMC while SD card is inserted -- in case you think about this get back to us here) Regarding the use of GL830... Xunlong (Orange Pi maker) is pretty good in making hardware but not that great when it's about software. I believe they simply didn't know how bad GL830 performs in reality. And the reason why they developed the 'Plus' with an USB-to-SATA bridge is rather simple. The first 'Orange Pi' was based on Allwinner's A20 which features a real SATA port. Then Xunlong developed a quad-core successor based on Allwinner's A31 (no SATA any more) and after discovering that Allwinner discontinued A31/A31s they chose H3 instead (still no SATA). Providing a 'Plus' model that lacks features is a bit problematic and so they added GL830 (this bridge is also used on the A31 equipped MeLE TV boxes so maybe it just looked as 'best' choice when developing the board?). It took also some time until the first people realized that performance is not that great (applies still to some 'communities' around other SBC, especially Banana Pi M3 which uses the same GL830 in an even more weird and less performant way). At least now we know how performance looks like... and choosing the cheaper Plus 2E and combining with a good USB disk enclosure seems to be the better idea in the meantime.

In case you start from scratch again I would suggest using the most recent image: Armbian_5.20_Orangepiplus_Debian_jessie_3.4.112.7z Please be aware that there's currently a bug influencing upgrade to 5.20. It is strongly recommended to do it this way otherwise you might end up with a bricked installation: http://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-update I would first check your power supply (able to provide enough voltage and amperage), a 2.5" HDD might need up to 1A additional power when it spins up, in case you use crappy cables this might lead then to an undervoltage situation and system freezes. And I would also refrain from moving the system to a SATA disk (HDDs especially behind the GL830 are slow as hell compared to Orange Pi's eMMC!). And at least what I really like about those SBC is that they consume as less as 1W which somewhat contradicts with using an HDD in 'always spinning' mode. Regarding your use case you can choose any webserver on a H3 device. Even Apache with all modules loaded should be fine or at least your OPi still fast enough to cope with bloated software

I downloaded the following file Armbian_5.14_Orangepiplus_Debian_jessie_3.4.112.7z. Or maybe I can check the system via the shell? Now I can boot from eMMC (disconnecting the HDD was crutial?) For now I try everything for learning purposes - this is my first encounter with SBC. I want to make a Web server to show information from temperature sensors. I also want to control the outputs via web page. I understand the information about speed of the different usb-hdd bridges. Still if I want to use the HDD with inbuilt GL830 what should be my next step? I want to install lighttpd. Is it a good choice?

Which Armbian variant are you using? Vanilla or legacy? Ubuntu or Debian? Then: OPi Plus has no SATA just the slowest USB-to-SATA bridge in the world. GL830 is also known to report wrong drive sizes: https://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi/2016-06-27#16843360; So the best what you can do with this SATA connector is to avoid it. If you want to use it anyway then put nothing on it where performance is needed. Follow arox' adivce, disconnect the HDD, install Armbian on eMMC using our nana_sata_install script. The eMMC is several times faster regarding sequential transfer speeds than any HDD connected to GL830 and also magnitudes faster if it's about the more important random IO performance. Then please describe your use case. If it's about headless NAS or web serving then I would buy an externally powered drive enclosure with JMS567 and use mainline kernel in the near future since then you can make use of UASP (not possible with onboard GL830)