Interesting board. But Raspberry Pi 4 can be easily overclocked, the worst unit I had was OK upto 1750MHz, the other upto 1850MHz and the third one (I'm using as a desktop now) runs at 2GHz flawlessly.
Some people swear that placing the CPU on the bottom of the board is the right way of cooling it down, because the upper side can be left for expansion boards. True, but the heat must get out of the bottom of the board anyway, and with that laying on a table, it's easily blocked by the board itself. In industrial environments it's easier as the board including a heatsink may be mounted upside down or in any position.
I'm glad Raspberry Pi 4 has all the power hungry chips at the top, because I can get rid of the heat easily - dissipate it all upwards passively.
And about the new interfaces - I agree that 4 lane NVMe is a bit overkill, because the bottleneck would certainly be somewhere else - in the gigE for example. DisplayPort - certainly nice. The biggest feature I see is the VPU with hardware decoding of multiple video formats - perhaps yet to come to the future Raspberry Pi. But don't forget software, if it ain't gonna work out of the box, it's useless.
I was dreaming about multiple SATA ports for my Pi, but with some external bridges running over USB3, it's doable. The biggest peculiarity I'm always scared of is the handling of disk errors by usb to sata bridges. But with UASP protocol, it may be a scare of the past. There's hope in this article
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/faster-usb-disk-io-for-raspberry-pi
for us, NAS eager users - maybe the UASP protocol handles all the errors, maybe even S.M.A.R.T. transparently? I seriously don't know, If you do, please respond. If you do know of the best USB3 <-> SATA bridge without quirks, report it, please. I'm looking for a decent SATA bridge from the beginning of the Raspberry Pi usage.
Some bridges worth mentioning:
Geekworm Raspberry Pi 4 SATA Storage
Radxa’s Dual and Quad SATA HATs
Radxa’s Dual ($25) and Quad ($35) SATA HATs work on the Raspberry Pi 4 or Rock Pi 4 at up to 400 MB/s via USB 3.0. There’s also a faster, 800 MB/s $49 “Penta SATA HAT” for the Rock Pi 4 that uses PCIe to support 5x drives.
linuxgizmos.com
The latter has JMicron
JMS561 bridge. I don't know if it's blacklisted by the Linux kernel (for having some bugs) or not. If you have personal experience, please report it.
I'm interested in a controller, that can be used in UASP mode/protocol.
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