Marvell and Globalscale Technologies developed a new single-board computer called the EspressoBIN (website). Unlike any other cheap SBC I am aware of, it has:
- 3 ethernet ports
- a SATA port
In other words, it’s perfect to act as a home router with an attached hard drive that runs apps. Now, where have we heard that before? Ah yes, Indie Box and UBOS.
I have been very eager to get my hands on it, and backed the project on Kickstarter. Last week I received the board, and now it’s up, running
Arch Linux ARM for now.
And it talks to the hard drive:
So it’s all very nice. Except the SATA power. As you can tell from the picture, I had to misuse a 1-male-to-2-female splitter in order to be able to connect: all SATA power adapters I have are male, and the EspressoBIN connector is male, too! A mistake? Intentional? I don’t know but have posted to their forums to find out.
Comments
One response to “My EspressoBIN board is up”
Congrats – I’m also keen to test an esprossobin since I got aware of the kickstarter compain (got notified by Globalscale because I’m a former SheevaPlug user.), but hesitated so far.
I’m currently using a Cubietruck (Cubieboard 3) with a 4 TB 2.5″ HDD attached to its SATA-Port, using it with Debian Jessie (armbian) e.g. as NAS.
Do you already have any I/O / throughput data, e.g. file copies over the network to a smb share?
(I roughly come up to 30 MB/s max.)