Parallella Community

Hello Adapteva and Parallella team. My name is Alex and I'm not a programmer or software designer. I am just a simple PC user and hope to become soon a Parallella owner. Also it is a cool reason to switch to Linux from this narrow minded Windows platform (no offence for Windows users, as I am the one myself).

For using this brilliant computer for everyday tasks the only thing missing is a BIG storage place for Photos, Video, Music and other personal information. SD card slot won't be enough for this purpose. Modern HDDs are at 3TB size point and SSDs are at 1TB. It would be very nice to include a few SATA ports on the board so you could hit a market of simple users. Also SATA ports can be used for ODD (although today there are lots of external USB DVD and Blu-Ray drives, this option would be welcome).

So the question is: are you planning to include SATA ports in Parallella?

We may be integrating SATA on future versions of the Parallella board. For now, there may be something that could be set up in the short term using a PATA/SATA converter like the one attached. There should be enough GPIO pins/gates on the Zynq SOC to support it, but we have to admit we haven't had time to look into it closely yet. Would love to hear people chime in regarding feasibility of such a hack.

PATA/SATA converter

photo.JPG (35.35 KiB) Viewed 20886 times

Does the board have usb2 or 3 that could be used for external storage.

regards
Al

The Parallella board has a UBS 2.0 port that can be used for external storage.

Hello folks,

Personally would like to see the hardware stay as small as possible. Things are getting smaller. HDD will be a thing of the past soon as compression and solid state (flash) media are more perfected. HDD create more heat, need more power...etc...

Would rather see people move toward a network storage solution like a NAS or similar device for large disk spaces. I've had a d-link NAS for a year now and its a share point for 3 end machines: PS3, HTPC, and the tv in my bedroom. Ubuntu makes it very easy, even more easy than windows, to network a drive. Just food for thought. Keep the data fast on SSDs and flash and run data from larger networked drives.

Does the board have Ethernet also?

Hi Al,

There is planned support for 10/100/1000 Ethernet.

Thank you for response Andreas.

SATA ports would be very nice to see in future parallella boards. Not so many people are using NAS storage, because good NAS server is expensive.

If you won't build any SATA ports on board then mSATA would be ok (today there is a good amount of great mSATA SSDs).

Hi all,
i think having USB3 port or sata, is very useful to process many files in parallel, when you read/write files using usb2 or the sd cards, overall performance degrade