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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Surprised no sata headers.

I’ll def wait to see if the fanless heat sinks work out on these first

SATA is awkward because the drives need a +12V rail, and this board probably doesn't have one, so they'd have to cram another power supply in along with the SATA controller or leave the user to bodge together an external power supply solution. If you don't mind doing the latter you could put a SATA controller in the M.2 slot:

https://www.amazon.com/MZHOU-Support-Interface-Spports-Windo...

The board is powered via USB-C PD at 12V, so it might as well have a 12V rail.

But with a SATA connector they probably would have to account for power hungry devices with spinning disks, which feels a bit antithetic to having a power efficient processor.

I have a similar board on order, and yes, you need a 12v source

Only 3.5" drives need 12v though.

I've never come across a consumer 2.5" SATA device that uses 12V.

I've been plugging them into my laptop's USB ports for a couple of decades or so now with no 12V rail in sight

No issues.

And for 3.5" SATA devices, I am smart enough to know to use an external power supply.

Lack of on-board 12V has never stopped me.

It has also never stopped anyone with a conventional ATX PC on their desk (oh noes! external power again!)

Whatever the reason is to not include a SATA port, power ain't it.

I think they just had to make some compromises for price and form factor. There are a lot of other boards out there based on the N100 or its close friends. You might like the ODROID-H4+. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/

The advantage of the Radxa X4 is that you can buy it instead of a Raspberry Pi: similar price, similar form factor, similar GPIO options via the on-board RP2040.

Very true. That might be a better fit for NAS like applications

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