Penta SATA hat custom cables/integrations

Hardware and peripherals SATA HAT
1

Hi all,

I have just bought the Penta SATA hat to complement with my Rock Pi 4B+ and build a NAS.
Since I am going to use a custom case from an old NAS which motherboard got broken, I have also bought the OLED screen with the respective I2C cable (4 pins) and the original power button from the case.

I know that the Penta SATA hat has a PHD 2x5 2.0mm connector and I would like to use that to connect the OLED screen and the power button.

Both the I2C and power button cables have Dupont 2.54mm connectors and I was wondering if anybody managed to either find or build custom cables from Dupont 2.54mm male to PHD 2.0mm female and if that worked.

I do not want to buy the top board because it would not be useful for my purpose so any help or guidance to leverage the PHD 2x5 2.0mm (or any other way that I might have overlooked), it would be appreciated including some advice on the pinout if this would be possible (Radxa team: maybe you already have some custom cables either Dupont 1 pin to PHD 1 pin or Dupont 2 pines to PHD 2 pins to address this need?)

Thank you and best regards,
Alessandro

2

Probably all of them are just wired up to gpio pins, so just try to measure them with multimeter, this should be just small gpio connection.

edit: connector is described in wiki:
https://wiki.radxa.com/Penta_SATA_HAT
https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT

3

Hi @dominik. Thanks a lot for your answer: I have seen the pinout on the Wiki and I will try to build some custom cable myself to unlock some more funcionalities.

I will keep you posted!

P.S.: so far, I am really happy with the Penta SATA hat and the Rock Pi 4B+: pretty solid solution.

1 Like
4

Have You measured speed on this interface with this setup? What disks and layout You tried?

5

@dominik anything you are particularly interested into knowing?
I have tested a few things and I can give you some numbers: my NAS has 4x3.5’’ inches HDD (WD Red series, one is starting to show some possible issues, but I have a replacement ready) so they run at lower speeds

Anyway I have tested the interface with hdparm, SMB, SFTP since I pretty much use it as a file server and to run a few containers.

Let me know which numbers you are interested in!

Cheers!

6

Are You using any RAID there? What kind of drives? What speed can You achieve?

7

Yeah. Forgot to mention:

I have a RAID10 running OMV on Armbian Bullseye. 4 WD Red (really ancient, year 2012) and I get:

SMB: 64MB/s on Gigabit
SFTP: 90MB/s on Gigabit

Hdparm on HDD 112MB/s

8

Gigabit is limiting several things, and yes - old drives are not great choice. Slowest one I tested was 1TB drive from macbook - it performed about 80MB/s. New SSD dramatically improves computer speed to something about 550MB/s). Still 80MB/s is bit below that what 1GB ethernet can do.

9

I am changing HDDs hardware configuration, RAID and upgrading to 2.5Gbit (through USB3 adapter).

It is going yo take me a few weeks, but I kight have new results to share :slight_smile:

10

Hi @Goph

Did you manage the connection to the SATA hat board?
I’m assembling a similar build, but I wanna connect PWM fan(s) to the SATA hat board.
Did you find or make a connector?
I want to avoid soldering to the PHD 2x5 header and I also don’t want to buy the top board just for a connector.

P.S. Sorry for necroposting.