I've been working on what's best described as a "digital bug-out box" and it needs a lot of reliable storage. I want to use 2.5" SATA SSD's because they are fairly cheap and robust. This project needs a single-board computer, but few SBC's have native SATA interfaces (let alone a way to attach several), so I started looking for one that I could use a PCIe SATA board with.
I've also wanted to move the things I depend on away from proprietary designs, and while ARM has been great, RISC-V is more open (you can fab your own on a bare FPGA). When I saw that PINE64 had a RISC-V SBC that also has a PCIe interface, I was sold.
It's going to be an uphill battle (the support for this board is limited) but I like to do things the hard way so that's no deterrent.
The first step will be to grab the Armbian build for the board and see how far that goes. Once it's booting and on the network I'm planning to harvest a SATA board and backplane from the pod and see what the Star64 thinks of that. If I can get it to reliably see a disk attached to the backplane, well that will be enough to declare victory.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026