Tinker Board Forum

Have a look at this gadget. It is an expansion board designed for Raspberry Pi. It connects through HDMI, and gives USB 3.0 and SATA interfaces, plus safe powering through GPIO. If it works with the Tinkerboard, it can be a bomb for only 20€:

http://www.raspberrypiwiki.com/index.php/X820
http://www.suptronics.com/miniPCkits/x820.html

I haven't tried one and I haven't seen any Pi users commenting on it so this is pure speculation...

It doesn't appear to require any software on the Pi, so I kinda wonder if it depends on some "feature" of the VC4.
I would think that Suptronics would state that it works with _any_ SBC that matches the pi2/pi3 board layout if if there is no software/feature dependency.

It's been out for a while, so you would think it would have been discussed... somewhere.

I found a reference to it in the Pi forum - The consensus seems to be it's an overpriced USB/SATA adapter. It may still be worth a look if it truly is USB 3 to SATA, The form factor is kinda awkward, though. The metal case option may reduce the range of BT/WiFi by quite a bit.

Oh, I see. So it just connects through the USB 2.0 port. Since I saw the HDMI connection, I thought it worked differently, kind of establishing a high-speed ethernet connection through HDMI.

Then it is not definitely worth...

Well they bill it as a USB 3 to SATA, so are they somehow creating a USB 3 connection from HDMI or what? If its only USB2 to SATA, it is certainly overpriced and they should be slapped upside da head for "inaccurate" advertising.

I have one, it's not fast. I'm a linux noob, but if you can tell me what you'd like tested and how, I'll be happy to. Can't tell you much more right now, as it's currently dumping a pretty large backup to a drive... slowly.

The HDMI looks to be just a passthrough... it simply reroutes the wiring to the edge of the X820 board so everything plugs in to one side.

I have the SupTronics X850 on a Raspberry Pi v3. The X850 is a HAT on top of the SoC, not a "bottom card" as the X820. I have ordered the same HAT for my TB, but it's still in the mail.

The RPi looks like this with the X850 - the TB would look pretty much identical:



Here are the performance stats for write operations in the RPi. You can see numbers for SD card, USB thumb drive (white Samsung visible on the left hand side in the pic above) and the X850:



As you can see, there is a good performance increase when using USB or mSata (via USB) compared to the SD card. All numbers are Mbit/s.