Hardkernel's ODROID-HC4 "Toaster" Board Takes Aim at Low-Cost Home Cloud Storage
Available with or without OLED display panel, the new system uses a PCIe to SATA bridge to host up to two 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives.
Hardkernel has announced a new entry in the ODROID family of single-board computers, targeting those looking to build a home cloud system: the ODROID-HC4, available with or without a compact OLED display panel.
"ODROID-HC4 is new Home-Cloud platform based on the same Arm CPU as the ODROID-C4," the company explains of its latest launch. "We adopted a 12nm fabricated energy efficient 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 quad core processor with faster 4GB DDR4 RAM. A 16MiB SPI flash chip exists on the board for the useful Petitboot feature."
"We decided to drop the use of USB3.0 to SATA bridge solutions (quirks, additional IO layer, etc) for the ODROID-HC4. We are therefore using a more native and reliable PCIe to SATA direct bridge solutions. In doing so the HC4 board provides two SATA storage docks. A 5.5mm DC power jack, UHS-1 compatible micro-SD slot, USB 2.0, HDMI 2.0 and 1GbE port are available on the rear side of the transparent shell case."
The board is built around the Amlogic S905X3 system-on-chip with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor running at 1.8GHz, Mali-G31 MP2 GPU running at 650MHz, and an Arm TrustZone security system. This is linked to 4GB of DDR4 memory, a microSD slot for storage, and a single gigabit Ethernet port along with HDMI 2.0 video output, a USB 2.0 host port, and the two SATA connectors for hard drives — plus an infrared receiver for remote controls and the optional OLED panel.
The bundled casing takes up to two 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives or SSDs in a "toaster" layout, using the new PCIe to SATA bridge to connect them to the SoC. There's no hardware RAID, instead relying on software RAID via mdadm, LVM, or the user's own choice of software to handle a desire to combine the two drives into a single logical volume. The board supports Linux 4.9.320 or newer via Hardkernel's official operating system images, or mainline kernel 5.8 and above when using unofficial images - and the Petitboot system allows it to run its operating system from one of the SATA-connected drives, too.
The ODROID-HC4 is now available for $65 without or $75 with OLED display via the Hardkernel shop. Additional information is up on the wiki.