pcengines replacement

Yes, it's my feeling, based on how guarantees and laws and such surrounding those statements work in the jurisdictions they're made, if the reputation of the company making it matters, or will they just spin up a different name, and if companies actually make them or not. Is Rack Matrix making a guarantee or is Broachlink? Does Rack Matrix own the design (and therefore can go to a different vendor for production to keep up a guarantee) or Broachlink?

In my experience, Chinese companies do not care about reputation or long term promises, which is why they do not inspire me.

What else does not inspire confidence is the 404-ed link in your original post about it on Rack Matrix.
 
USB 3.0-only M.2? So weird. I guess there are modems that do this?

Also that soldered-in EMMC is a ? Why do that and not a SD slot?
 
msplsh said:
In my experience, Chinese companies do not care about reputation or long term promises, which is why they do not inspire me.
Click to expand...
me neither. Actually, you cannot compare those Chinese chepo devices to the solid APUs, this is just mockery.
 
Lanner has been around for a long time. They are not going anywhere.
I found NCA1010 to be a very nice compact router.
Can be found cheap as 'Untangle' box and other OEM.

I just got one of these for dirt. Silicom is Intel affiliated for small projects like Minnowboard and this box.

Verizon Open Development | device

opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com

Pretty fat. Denverton C3436L but no storage options eMMC only. X552 Intel backplane is supported on 14.

Some kind of SOHO router. WWAN in M.2/USB slot and WLAN in MiniPCI slot

InstallCXD3600

The User Guide provided in the BranchSDO Orchestrator will help you configure the CXD edge device parameters and system settings
www.acumera.com www.acumera.com
 
If everybody had that opinion we would still be using floppies...

CFast is nothing more than a socket/card arrangement. It can't be obnoxious.

On top of that it uses SATA, a pretty well know format.

I am afraid storage does advance every once in a while. CFast can do 550MB/s while Compact Flash? ATA6 ??? Isn't that ancient now?
What is the fastest SD Card out there?
 
eMMC is typically absurdly slow and not particularly durable. I would prefer they just provide a SD slot which is a similar standard and cheaper than a chip (BYOD) for the manufacturer. SD card wears out? Get a new one. SD card too small? Get a new one. SD card too slow? Get a new one. The review even notes that eMMC is... not great.

Asking for CFast is wishful thinking. Completely different standard, different footprint (micro SD card will fit where that Kingston chip is), and a different electrical interface that will probably need another chip.
 
Micro SD slots are still ample thanks to Arm and phones.

It just seems contradictory to want 10GBe interfaces but stick to old school storage.

I really don't have a dog to pick with eMMC. All the Sophos boxes use them along with Dell Edge 620/640.

sysutils/mmc-utils is pretty powerful tool when working with eMMC protected partition schemes.
This is essentially the mmc command from u-boot on the FreeBSD command line.
eMMC have disk tools to help.

I do enjoy the Pine64/Rock64 detachable eMMC but mainly for ease of programming. I have a USB writer key.
Instead of booting off USB stick via serial console to write image to eMMC it is plug and play.
 
msplsh said:
eMMC is typically absurdly slow and not particularly durable.
Click to expand...
Do you have any data on this? I don't mean that snarkily; I've been looking at a few machines that have eMMC and wondering if I installed the OS on there how long it would actually last.

Most of what I'm reading on the internet says the modern eMMC chips will easily last 5+ years; especially if you just use the eMMC for OS and make sure most writing e.g. logs etc. goes on some other storage.

I've got a Protectli machine with eMMC so I'm going to install FreeBSD on there and see how I go but interested if you have some specific, recent, sources for eMMC performance and (more importantly for my interests) durability.

My SD card experiences - even with decent brands - on RPis has been disappointing so I'm not a great fan of SD cards based on that.
 
Five years and the board is trash because the eMMC is dead or "eh, whatever" and buy a new SD card. Easy choice.
 
the kingston data above is for a 4GB mmc which is at the low end of capacity
a 16GB one will last 10 years while writing 1GB / day
i have hp430 thin client with a 32Mb emmc
its better than any sd card ive seen (writes 100mb/s)
 
Here a SD card rated and tested at slightly above that speed and it's 4x larger and it's $10 if it gets broken.

I'll admit that deployed eMMC in devices has improved, but eMMC is for disposable devices, IMO, whereas SD is also disposable, but also replaceable. I understand the desire to not go SSD due to cost reasons, but SD is right there.
 
What? You're not spending money on devices you have to throw away entirely after a short while? You Sir, you need to take a consumer refreshment class ASAP! You're doing it all wrong!
While I have your attention, may I interest you in our new subscription model?
 
jbo@ said:
You Sir, you need to take a consumer refreshment reeducation class ASAP!
Click to expand...
There, FTFY. I'll mail you the invoice.

Back OT: I hate these planned obsolescence things with a passion and will not spend money on it if I do not absolutely have to. If the use case is only starting a system and then running in tmpfs (firewall, print server...), that is a moment to rethink this. But I have seen laptops with this, and I would not buy them.
 
rootbert said:
yeah I am fine with cheapos doing firewalling stuff where I can just throw in another box and deploy the config, however, I am hesitant with systems where I attach valuable data storage.

Protectli has nice boxes, but no ECC. I would like to buy something from the opnsense shop to support the project, however, they also do not have variants with ecc. Onlogic has some nice boxes, but > 2k € is a bit too much. The Aaeon look nice. And also the kobol with the ECC variant seems to be very attractive: https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/intro/ - according to the wiki the chipset is supported by FreeBSD. Sadly the repositories on github have been idle for quite some time, but a benchmark suggests internally ~ 80MB/sec or via network ~40MB/sec speed - benchmark in german .

Jetway has some nice mainboards, but too expensive. Seems like I am really hitting a niche market, ECC is usually just offered for the upper performance class server/embedded stuff. www.minipc.de is a cool shop though an awkward webinterface should someone stumble upon this thread ...
Click to expand...
It is unfortunate that the OPNsense shop doesn’t have ECC, because otherwise I would highly recommend them for you. I recently got a DEC675 from them. It is really nice, and only slightly larger than the PC Engines ALIX boards we used to use back in the M0n0wall days. (For a while I was running OPNsense on repurposed Checkpoint 4600 devices from eBay in order to save money, but after two out of three of them failed—they are past end-of-life, after all—I decided to get serious and get some decent hardware.)

You are probably right about being in a niche market. Best of luck finding what you are looking for (and please tell us when you do).
 
I have really been surprised at how many OEM'ers used PCEngines. I just spotted another tonight:

Link Labs box:
www.ebay.com

LinkLabs Symphony Link Gateway (Cellular) LL1A17SYMA046 | eBay

WHATEVER YOU SEE IN THE PICTURES IS WHAT YOU WILL RECEIVE. Power Cord Not Included.
www.ebay.com

Previously I was aware of SimpleWAN boxes and Star2Star boxes.

APU1 inside custom Orange Chassis:
www.ebay.com

MIXED X2 SimpleWAN Advanced SNAPCOM NETWORK APPLIANCE (SW301DA-NA, SW301DA-NFR) | eBay

<p dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">This mixed set of two SimpleWAN Advanced SNAPCOM network appliances is perfect for any enterprise networking needs. With its advanced firewall capabilities, it is sure to keep your network secure from any outside threats. The USB format makes...
www.ebay.com

Another APU1 for VOIP:
www.ebay.com

Star2Star Starlite PBX Cloud VoIP 20 Extension Telephone LAN Network System T5 | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Star2Star Starlite PBX Cloud VoIP 20 Extension Telephone LAN Network System T5 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com

Post any others I might have missed please.
 
I finally did it - after quite some research I have finally settled with the Advantech FWA-1112VC-4CA1S. It is an absolute solid product and meets my expectations and a solid upgrade to my pcengines APU 4. It is fanless and comes with a 4-core Intel ATOM C3558, 2x i211 GBit network interfaces, 2x X553 GBit network interfaces, 2x X553 SFP+ 10GBit. I have ordered a 32GB ECC module and a 480 GB NVME, both certified for operating in a temperature range of -40 to 85°C. I am happy I did choose this one and not one of the qotom devices, where I have mixed experience (a.k.a. you get what you pay for). I am absolutely satisfied and can highly recommend it.

What do I use it for? Firewall, some jails: local mail-archive, backup/storage, media archive, software development/test systems, databases, some VMs: ad-hoc testing or starting things on demand like kali linux.
 
I like your hardware choice. Advantech is a no-brainer.

FWA-1112VC

Fanless Network Appliance for SD-WAN & uCPE Edge Deployment with Coming 5G & Wi-Fi 6 Support
www.advantech.com www.advantech.com

Running all that stuff on a firewall???? I am brainwashed into keeping my firewall just that. It may be overkill but it makes it simple.
I really want to run munin collector on my firewall but it just sucks in too much bloat. No python on my firewall please.
 
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