I've done quite a lot of research on this, and wondered what other people's experiences/opinions are.
It seems looking around that there are many different manufacturers of ARM processors, well, of the type of CPUs we're talking about in these forums. I've had a look at Raspberry Pi and Odroid, Odroid in most detail so far. What I generally end up finding is that almost everybody except Marvell seem to have limited support for high speed interfaces such as PCIe and SATA. Marvell on the other hand have four SATA lines on their Armada chips (and also four PCIe lines). And, I see a lot of (non Marvell) ARM CPUs that have good graphics capabilities that are more suited for things like media players and smart phones, so use in a storage application seems a "waste" with GPU not doing much at all.
Also, as a long term Seagate fan, I recently removed a hard drive's PCB, and found Marvell chips on it. Plus I see Marvell chips on SATA addon cards to go in PCs. Marvell do seem to be therefore heavily involved in hard disc / storage chips.
So, I don't know if anyone else has come to the conclusion that Marvell seem to be producing "superior" ARM CPUs (or not), in the context of storage applications.
Why I keep on researching this, is that I'd like to see a multiport SATA (4x, 6x, 8x, 12x etc) development board at Rasberry Pi (ish) prices, for DIY NAS systems. Obviously SATA on CPU or attached via PCIe is better than USB/SPI/Serial etc.
Probably back in the real world .... many port SATA ARM dev boards - may never be produced, as I think NAS producers probably have a vested interest in not making that kind of technology available in a development board or cheaply hackable, because that's where there profit margins are.
Anyway, just my opinions above, and a request for your opinions and experiences, what do you think ?
It seems looking around that there are many different manufacturers of ARM processors, well, of the type of CPUs we're talking about in these forums. I've had a look at Raspberry Pi and Odroid, Odroid in most detail so far. What I generally end up finding is that almost everybody except Marvell seem to have limited support for high speed interfaces such as PCIe and SATA. Marvell on the other hand have four SATA lines on their Armada chips (and also four PCIe lines). And, I see a lot of (non Marvell) ARM CPUs that have good graphics capabilities that are more suited for things like media players and smart phones, so use in a storage application seems a "waste" with GPU not doing much at all.
Also, as a long term Seagate fan, I recently removed a hard drive's PCB, and found Marvell chips on it. Plus I see Marvell chips on SATA addon cards to go in PCs. Marvell do seem to be therefore heavily involved in hard disc / storage chips.
So, I don't know if anyone else has come to the conclusion that Marvell seem to be producing "superior" ARM CPUs (or not), in the context of storage applications.
Why I keep on researching this, is that I'd like to see a multiport SATA (4x, 6x, 8x, 12x etc) development board at Rasberry Pi (ish) prices, for DIY NAS systems. Obviously SATA on CPU or attached via PCIe is better than USB/SPI/Serial etc.
Probably back in the real world .... many port SATA ARM dev boards - may never be produced, as I think NAS producers probably have a vested interest in not making that kind of technology available in a development board or cheaply hackable, because that's where there profit margins are.
Anyway, just my opinions above, and a request for your opinions and experiences, what do you think ?