CubieTruck Metal Case Unboxing and Disassembly

CubieTruck Metal Case is a kit comprised of CubieTruck (aka CubieBoard 3), a 128GB SSD, a 5,300 mAh battery, a power adapter, and various cables. In case you are not familiar with CubieTruck, it’s a development board by CubieTech, based on Allwinner A20 dual core ARM Cortex A7 processor with 2GB RAM, 8GB NAND flash, a SATA connector, HDMI & VGA outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 USB host ports, and a mini USB OTG port. CubieTech decided to sent me a kit, as it was featured on CNX Software, and today, I’ll show what’s exactly is inside the kit since the product description is not 100% clear. I’ve been told it’s pre-installed with Lubuntu, so in a separate post next week, I’ll try Linux, report on the SSD performance, and check the battery UPS function, and possibly life on a charge. CubieTruck Metal Case Unboxing I’ve received the kit in a […]

Linux Kernel 3.13 Release

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.13 yesterday: The release got delayed by a week due to travels, but I suspect that’s just as well. We had a few fixes come in, and while it wasn’t a lot, I think we’re better off for it. At least I hope so – I’ll be very disappointed if any of them cause more problems than they fix.. Anyway, the patch from rc8 is fairly small, with mainly some small arch updates (arm, mips, powerpc, s390, sparc, x86 all had some minor changes, some of them due to a networking fix for the bpf jit). And drivers (mainly gpu and networking). And some generic networking fixes. The appended shortlog gives more details. Anyway, with this, the merge window for 3.14 is obviously open. Kernel 3.12 brought new features to BTRFS and XFS file systems, PC’s GPU drivers improvements, better memory handling, […]

SATA-IO µSSD Standard for Embedded Solid State Drives

Sandisk iSSD 128GB

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) recently announced a new standard for embedded solid state drives (SSDs) called “SATA µSSD”. This standard offers high-performance, low-cost, embedded storage solutions for mobile computing platforms like ultra-thin laptops. The µSSD specification eliminates the module connector from the traditional SATA Interface, allowing drives to be manufactured in single ball grid array (BGA) packages that sit directly on a motherboard. The new µSSD standard should be part of the SATA Specification. However, it does not seem to be in the latest SATA Specification (Revision 3.1) released in July 2011. This specification is available free of charge to members. For non-members, it can be purchased here for 25 USD. Sandisk is currently the only company providing products that follow the µSSD standard with its iSSD™ integrated storage device offering capacities of 8, 16,32, 64 & 128 GB and transfer throughput of up to 450MB/s via a […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC