Add Radxa Taco - the successor of the ROCK Pi SATA HAT(Penta SATA CM4 carrier board)

[hipboi]

I've been following this repository for quite long time. As a Raspberry Pi fan, we've been working on the Radxa Taco for a while, which is an ultimate CM4 carrier board designed for nas/server/router applications. The ideas is based on the Quad SATA HAT for the Raspberry Pi 4 and go further beyond it. The Radxa Taco has the following features:

• Use asm1806 pcie switch
• Dual ethernet, one 1000M from CM4, one 2.5G rtk8125b to pcie switch
• 5x SATA via JMB585 to pcie switch
• 1x M.2 M key NVMe to pcie switch
• 1x PCIe M.2 WiFi module, support Intel AX200
• 10P header for Top Board with OLED and button
• RTC/USB 2/uSD card

The case is working on...

[hipboi]

We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested?

[JonathanTreffler]

We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested?

I would be interested, but i don't think i am an ideal candidate since i don't currently own a Raspberry Pi CM4 (damn chip shortage) and live in germany so i don't know about shipping.

[TMillesich]

We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested?

I would be interested too.
Got a CM4 WiFi 8GB 32GB, WD Red Disks 3+4TB and a PM991 (still waiting for my Piunora). With some SATA extension cords the hardware would be ready to go then.

What kind of test reports do you want? Power usage, thermal, mechanical improvements? Reports by OpenMediaVault?

[stephenvalente]

Be interested, but in the UK.

…

On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 6:55 PM TMillesich ***@***.***> wrote: We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested? I would be interested too. Got a CM4 WiFi 8GB 32GB, WD Red Disks 3+4TB and a PM991 (still waiting for my Piunora). With some SATA extension cords the hardware would be ready to go then. What kind of test reports do you want? Power usage, thermal, mechanical improvements? Reports by OpenMediaVault? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#202 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADSDV2CLHUUWHEKFSP6B6LTT6Z52BANCNFSM5C3GA2CQ> .

[geerlingguy]

@hipboi - Oh WOW. This is like... exactly the NAS board I've been dreaming someone would make.

How do I get my hands on one for testing? Case or not, if you can get this thing into production, I think it's going to be an incredibly compelling alternative to most of the SMB/home office NASes on the market!

[Bluebugs]

This is exactly what I have been looking for. I am in Canada and do not own yet a CM4, but this would be a perfect reason to order one right away :-)

[andyattebery]

Echo the sentiment that this is board I've been looking for. I'm interested in using it to try out zfs on Ubuntu, snapraid/mergerFS, and other NAS software solutions.

[jn-hrt]

We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested?

I would be interested. What sort of testing are you looking for? Do you have test plans/cases? Do you need test tracking through a specific tool like rally or just general feedback via github?

[xoseperez]

We now have some working samples, we can provide up to 5 samples to Jeff's fans. The only requirement is to provide some test report here. Anyone interested?

I am interested. Currently working on a board with similar specs, but not a NAS. It will be interesting to test thermals on your board and also speed while using the RTL8125 and the drives at the same time through the PCIe switch.

[hipboi]

@geerlingguy surely we can send you one :-) I can't wait to see it in your video, haha.

For who owns the CM4 above, send me an email of your shipping address with a contact phone number. Please refer this github link in the email. [email protected] We will ship immediately.

[hipboi]

The case is still in design, planning to make pluggable HDD, also need to cool the CM4 and HDDs. The mechanical design is tricky.

[mi-hol]

The mechanical design is tricky.

@hipboi
That's the reason I'd leave building a case to established manufacturers of enclosures :)
Are there good reasons for re-inventing the wheel?
How about using a ITX case by making the board and connectors compatible with ITX standard?

[hipboi]

@mi-hol

ITX is another direction, what we want to archive is, a small desktop NAS instead of a PC enclosure. Something like we done for the Raspberry Pi 4.

For the ITX case, we are planning something else for it. It will be Quad A55 based, 8GB ECC ram, dual SAS connector for 4 SATA each.

[tkokyie]

Hi Im got CM4 and I'm interested in this. Let me know how to get it to be tester

[hipboi]

Update: 5 samples are gone.

[tsaotse]

When will it be released?

[geerlingguy]

I just received my board today. Like, a couple minutes ago. This thing is very, very neat. Going to be playing around with it soon!

[andyattebery]

I spent some time testing the board over the weekend. Here are my initial thoughts and notes:

• The SATA connectors are female 22 pin (7+15) which are great if you are using 2.5" drives, but not so much for 3.5" drives. I bought some male to male adapters, so I could plug in standard female 7 pin SATA cables.
• I only had a 3.5A power supply readily available instead of the 5A that was suggested, so I powered the 4 3.5" drives I'm using from a spare computer PSU. Once I get a 5.5mm x 2.5mm barrel adapter for my 8A power supply, I'll test powering the drives directly. However, I didn't see any female to female 15 pin SATA power cables on Amazon, so this might involve hacking together some from spare module PSU cables. (Please tell me if there is a better way.)

• Compute Modules with eMMC have the micro SD card slot disabled since the SD connectivity goes to the eMMC. Because the board doesn't have a "periphrial" USB port to flash the eMMC, there isn't a great way to directly install an OS to the eMMC without also having an IO Board or similar. I used a USB drive as a boot drive plugged into the USB 2.0 port; surprisingly this wasn't as slow as I was expecting. I suppose once booted from the USB drive, the OS installation could be copied to the eMMC.
• I updated the bootloader to the newest version to support NVMe drive booting as outlined here and by Jeff. To avoid needing to boot the full version of Raspberry Pi OS to use the SD Card Copier utility, I used a NVMe to USB adapter to directly install the OS to the drive and initially booted it from USB to install the updates. I discovered that even the newest bootloader won't boot a NVMe drive that is connected via a PCIe switch. This led me to copying the boot partition to a USB drive and leaving the root partition on the NVMe drive; the same kind of setup would work with a boot partition on the eMMC or SD card too. I was able to get this setup to work with Raspberry Pi OS (I only tested the newest 64-bit version) and Ubuntu 21.04.
• Even though the 'proposed' Ubuntu 21.04 kernel says it enabled SATA drive support, the kernel module didn't load for me. It also looks like the kernel module for the RTL8125 2.5GbE controller wasn't loaded either.
• I haven't tested the 2.5GbE controller on Raspberry Pi OS, but it looks like the kernel driver/module isn't loaded, and I don't see the network interface.

• I really wanted to test ZFS which is why I was trying to use Ubuntu since it has the kernel module built-in; however, now I realize I didn't verify the ARM/Raspberry Pi port has it, so maybe that was all for naught. I think my next steps will be compiling the Raspberry Pi OS kernel with ZFS support using the 45 Drives repo they used for the "Storinator Jr".
• Before I attempt to get ZFS working, I'll try to get some benchmarks for various mdadm RAID configurations.

[geerlingguy]

Board has been added to the site, going to open a new issue for testing: #268

[iandk]

I'm currently testing the board, however here are some first pics

[geerlingguy]

Closing this issue, and let's focus on adding test data to the related issue: #268.

[cilleyperson]

This board looks absolutely amazing. Maybe I could finally just go straight RPi NAS finally if this is ever available for sale :-)

[fluxsmith]

Did this make it into production? A google search for radxa taco returned only this thread. I’m currently running a four drive zfs draid system with Radxa’s earlier nas product. This would allow me to add ssd zil and cache.

[geerlingguy]

@fluxsmith - AFAICT this is still in final development, but I have an early prototype that I'm testing. I hope it will make it to production soon! See: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/radxa-taco.html

[rejsmont]

Hi there!

I am running a 40TB storage cluster using 2 RaspberryPIs 4s with 8GB RAM with two 5xSATA-to-USB3 enclosures, each with 5x4TB drives. Currently under FreeBSD with ZFS in raidz mode (linux has issues with ZFS and USB) with the two nodes glued together using GlusterFS, with an additional RaspberryPI 4 with 4GB RAM as an arbiter node. Would love to compare the performance to CM4s and this board!

Any chance to buy these soon? Are you interested in ZFS+GlusterFS performance figures?

Cheers,

Radek

[geerlingguy]

@rejsmont - ZFS + GlusterFS on top of two Raspberry Pi 4s with USB-to-SATA adapters, you do live on the edge!

[rejsmont]

@rejsmont - ZFS + GlusterFS on top of two Raspberry Pi 4s with USB-to-SATA adapters, you do live on the edge!

Knock on the wood - uptime of 3 months now, mean load of 20GB/day, zero issues thus far... I guess credit goes to the FreeBSD usb-storage driver implementation 😅

[WaaromZoMoeilijk]

@rejsmont - ZFS + GlusterFS on top of two Raspberry Pi 4s with USB-to-SATA adapters, you do live on the edge!

Knock on the wood - uptime of 3 months now, mean load of 20GB/day, zero issues thus far... I guess credit goes to the FreeBSD usb-storage driver implementation 😅

Yes I want to know more!!!! This is really bleeding edge 😂 could you share a little more? Can we DM on GitHub btw?

[ishi]

Is it possible, by any chance, to receive one of these for testing. I would love to test it. Perfect fit for home NAS with some additional compute capabilities 🤩

[vukitoso]

Hello.
The page https://wiki.radxa.com/Taco says:
One M.2 M Key for NVMe SSD
One M.2 E Key for WiFi 6 modules or Google Coral AI module
But in the photo there is only one M.2 port. Where is the second one?

Where can you buy this board?

[hipboi]

@Vebmaster

The new hw revision changes to two m.2. This board is only available in small sample quantity at the moment.

[vukitoso]

Radxa Taco only supports "Raspberry Pi CM4" or can I connect others? If others are possible, which ones?

If you use the Coral Edge module, then the SOM "Raspberry Pi CM4" will have problems:
"Installation failing on Raspberry Pi CM4 for PCI-E driver" - google-coral/edgetpu#280

[hipboi]

The Radxa CM3 RK3566 PCIe support:

• Support MSI with Per-Vector Masking (PVM) and 32 multiple MSI
• Support MSI-X with Per-Vector Masking (PVM) and 64 MSI-X table size

[vukitoso]

This board is only available in small sample quantity at the moment.

Is it possible to buy 1 board from you (with two m.2 slots)? If so, how much will it cost?

[WhiteRose96]

@Vebmaster

The new hw revision changes to two m.2. This board is only available in small sample quantity at the moment.

Hello, I've been following this project for quite some time. Very excited to see the final product. I'm interested in getting my hands on a sample if they are still available. Would absolutely love to help test.

[geerlingguy]

Please don't use this issue for product status information; please contact Radxa directly for that, or hop into their Discord to discuss availability. There aren't any more samples AFAICT, and they still plan on releasing the board for sale sometime before the end of this year.

[hipboi]

Anyone who is interested in the Taco board, can subscribe the notification here:

https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/sata-hat/products/taco

[ogg1e]

Any updates on case for 3.5 drives? I'd be happy with stl files to print on a 3d printer.

[mrbrazzi]

Hey everyone, I recently got my hands on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with 8GB RAM and 32GB EMMC, along with the Raxda Taco board. I also picked up an AC Adapter 12V 5.0A and a USB 2.0 cable A-A M-M.

I've been trying to get my CM4 to boot, but despite my extensive research and various troubleshooting steps, I haven't been successful.

Here's what I've tried so far:

1. Connected the board to the AC Adapter. The red power LED is on and steady, and the 4 Activity LEDs blink once.
2. Tried pressing and holding the Maskrom Key while connecting the board to the USB 2.0 cable and my Dell Latitude 5531 laptop with Windows 11. The red power LED stays on, the 4 Activity LEDs blink once, and there's an additional steady but low-intensity blue LED near the Maskrom Key. After running rpiboot, it just stays waiting.

RPIBOOT: build-date Dec 19 2023 version 20221215~105525 62ce49c0
Waiting for BCM2835/6/7/2711/2712...

3. Connected the board to the AC Adapter and the laptop using the USB 2.0 cable. The red power LED is on and steady, and the 4 Activity LEDs blink once.

Unfortunately, my Dell monitor isn't receiving any HDMI signal in all cases.

In the attached images, you will notice the red power LED and the blue LED.

@hipboi I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help me boot my Raxda Taco with the CM4.

Thank you very much in advance.

[hipboi]

@mrbrazzi Maybe you can try to flash the CM4 first and make sure you have OS in the eMMC then put the CM4 in the Taco?