[MinnowBoard] SATA Power Options

[David Rolfe]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply John, and it does look as if J2 would indeed be an 
ideal 'point' from which to obtain a 5v supply for something like a SATA 
SSD, but as I understand it these are not populated on current production 
boards, which I take to mean that the actual pins them selves are not in 
fact present, and so not therefore really a practical option for the average 
'user'.

If that is indeed the case, surely it would not have added much to the total 
build cost for these to have been included?

Is there any chance that this could possibly change in the future? (Probably 
more of a question for Dave!)

As an interesting aside, I would love to know whose SD cards do actually 
have a 90 Mb/s speed rating... any chance of a hint please?

Thanks,

David (Rolfe)

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 13:23:39 +0000
From: "Hawley, John" <john.hawley at intel.com>
To: MinnowBoard Development and Community Discussion
<elinux-minnowboard at lists.elinux.org>
Subject: Re: [MinnowBoard] Where to install Linux (or other OS) on a
MinnowBoard Max
Message-ID:
<2EED2AA90ADADC4B86683C59957EF02F012FADB7 at ORSMSX106.amr.corp.intel.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

With the base board there's a couple of things you can boot from with 
reasonable performance:

- SD Card (if you are going to do that I recommend a larger SD Card, BTRFS 
and adding the compress=[zlib|lzo] option to the boot flags)
- USB 3.0 (same general recommendation as an SD Card assuming it's flash 
based)
- SATA (either disk, or Disk On Module (DOM))

The first two don't require you to fish out power from another source, so 
that's useful.  The real downside to both an SD Card and a USB 3.0 flash 
based solution is there's limited number of writes you can do to an SD Card, 
and there's a *LOT* of cheap/slow options out there (so buyer beware, 
there's even a huge variance in speed in the Class 10 SD Cards ranging from 
about 10MB/s (that's all class 10 means is a guaranteed minimum of 10MB/s) 
to 90MB/s (which are the ones I've been picking up).  USB Flash drives vary 
even more wildly, so it's even harder to make a recommendation there.

The SATA options (sans an mSATA lure for example), do need power, and 
there's two places on the board you can get it:
- Low Speed Header (as suggested by David Rolfe), though I wouldn't myself 
recommend that
- J2 which was intended as a fan header, but if you add a header it's a 
reasonable place to pull power from.

The other option (if you are ok with an additional power supply) is to use 
an external USB sata adapter's power supply (if you snag the ones that don't 
have a case they often have a power adapter).  This is the way I do it.

- John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: elinux-minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org [mailto:elinux-
> minnowboard-bounces at lists.elinux.org] On Behalf Of David Rolfe
> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2014 6:07 AM
> To: elinux-minnowboard at lists.elinux.org
> Subject: [MinnowBoard] Where to install Linux (or other OS) on a
> MinnowBoard Max
>
> Hi.
>
> Following Roel Jordans installation comments, I was wondering if it is 
> indeed
> recommended to install an OS onto a (suitably large) micro SD card?
>
> Presumably an external SATA SSD drive is a preferred option but then of
> course there is the problem of an external power supply etc. - Possibly 
> from
> one of these extension leads which include a USB socket for charging 
> mobile
> phones?
>
> Although a 5v supply can always be obtained from pins 1 & 3 of the low
> speed expansion header. this would presumably then be lost if a lure was
> fitted?
>
> Comments would be appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
>
> David (Rolfe)