A Few Questions About Beagleboard Solid State Drives and USB Hub

[Richard Ashbery]

Can anyone recommend a 2.5" Solid State Drive that works with
Beagleboard -xM?

At the moment I am using an external USB hard drive - would I notice a
difference in access speed? I'm reading that speeds of up to 6GB/s are
possible with SSD which appear to be significantly faster than an
equivalent Sata hard drive.

What interfacing is required? The only information I can find is on
Sata to USB hard drive caddies - are these SSD compatible? Most users
seem to fit an SSD in their PC desktop so a direct SATA 3 connection
is likely to be available.

I understand keyboards/wireless mice slow down the USB speed
considerably - can a hub isolate these slower devices?

Regards

Richard

[Theo Markettos]

Richard Ashbery <bas...@invalid.addr.uk> wrote:
> At the moment I am using an external USB hard drive - would I notice a
> difference in access speed? I'm reading that speeds of up to 6GB/s are
> possible with SSD which appear to be significantly faster than an
> equivalent Sata hard drive.

The SSD is 6Gbit/s (not gigabytes), but you'll be restricted by the USB 2
bottleneck. The main advantage with a USB SSD is access time - there's
nothing mechanical to move so you can start reading files a lot faster.
That means that a 'USB 2 SSD' is rarer than a SATA version, because you lose
some of the advantages.

> What interfacing is required? The only information I can find is on
> Sata to USB hard drive caddies - are these SSD compatible? Most users
> seem to fit an SSD in their PC desktop so a direct SATA 3 connection
> is likely to be available.

Any USB hard drive caddy should work with an SSD - there's nothing special
about them. They're just hard drives without any spinning rust inside.
I'm afraid I have no experience of particular models on RISC OS though.

> I understand keyboards/wireless mice slow down the USB speed
> considerably - can a hub isolate these slower devices?

Keyboards and mice work slower, but you'll need a hub to connect them (the
BBXM has a builtin hub) and there's no problem mixing devices of different
speeds. The speed difference is something a driver writer has to worry
about but essentially nobody else.

Theo

[Chris Johnson]

In article <532bee96...@invalid.addr.uk>,

Richard Ashbery <bas...@invalid.addr.uk> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a 2.5" Solid State Drive that works with
> Beagleboard -xM?

I have three 120 GB SSDs, two from Maplin, and one from R-Comp. They
all work fine with a BB -xM (ARMini). I used the cheapest enclosures
Maplin has/had, about 14ukp.

I use these drives formatted Fat32, with Fat32Fs to read/write, since
this seems much faster than filecore format, although I am going to
get another and format to filecore standard and make some real
comparisons soon.

The drives I have work fine on Iyonix, ARMini (BB -xM) and
RaspberryPi.

--
Chris Johnson

[Richard Ashbery]

In article <FID*PX...@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, Theo Markettos

<theom...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Richard Ashbery <bas...@invalid.addr.uk> wrote:
> > At the moment I am using an external USB hard drive - would I
> > notice a difference in access speed?

> The SSD is 6Gbit/s (not gigabytes), but you'll be restricted by the
> USB 2 bottleneck.

Sorry - I meant 6Gb/s.

> The main advantage with a USB SSD is access time
> - there's nothing mechanical to move so you can start reading files
> a lot faster. That means that a 'USB 2 SSD' is rarer than a SATA
> version, because you lose some of the advantages.

Yes - I thought that would be an issue. On reflection I don't think I
would have a lot to gain buying SSD and there is a massive price
difference. A typical price for a Samsung 2.5" 250GB SSD is 125UKP
compared with an equivalent hard drive for 37UKP. I'll stick with the
hard drive.

> Any USB hard drive caddy should work with an SSD - there's nothing
> special about them.

Just the info. I require :-)

> They're just hard drives without any spinning
> rust inside.

Very amusing :-))

> I'm afraid I have no experience of particular models
> on RISC OS though.

> > I understand keyboards/wireless mice slow down the USB speed
> > considerably - can a hub isolate these slower devices?

> Keyboards and mice work slower, but you'll need a hub to connect
> them (the BBXM has a builtin hub) and there's no problem mixing
> devices of different speeds. The speed difference is something a
> driver writer has to worry about but essentially nobody else.

Thanks Theo and Chris for your useful replies.

Regards

Richard