RockyRAID - a trusty companion
==============================

You've heard of Rocky Road ice-cream? Well, RockyRAID (or 'Rocky' to his friends) is just as cool! He gets his name from two things - his
Rockchip RK3399 CPU and his RAID-capable disc interface. The RK3399 is a top-flight 32bit-capable ARM(R) architecture CPU, akin to that found in
our Pinebok Pro laptops. RK3399 powers a family of devices and this is
the debut of RK3399 on your desktop.

With room for two SSDs, eMMC (and, go on, yes, an SD if you must), there's
no shortage of storage options here. Your SSDs can either be treated as individual drives, or as part of a RAID array (typically a RAID 1 mirror
for data security - each drive is a copy of the other, so you're protected against a drive failure).

Knowing that our customers prefer to move away from SD cards where
possible, our mantra this year is very much "goodbye to SD", and if
they're necessary, to only use them in a "read-only" ROM-like capacity, as
we did on the ARMX6.

With that in mind, the eMMC is very exciting - high speed, robust storage
that will put those SD cards out to pasture (finally!). Demanding
applications will load and run beautifully - you can boot and run your
machine from eMMC, and have your data protected by RAID.

To try that out, we literally pulled out one of the SSDs mid-session, to simulate a failure. The computer continued running, browsing with Iris
(which was running from the RAID drive), without issue. Reconnecting
the drive saw the LEDs flicker indicating the drives were re-building/ re-syncing, without a reboot or disruption.

As you'd expect, the RK3399 provides high quality graphics up to 4K
resolution and multiple USB ports. It's a top quality platform with a lot
of industry support (boards available 'til 2029). RISC OS software compatibility is just as you'd expect, and Aemulor provides access to
legacy 26bit apps as usual. The RockTools software provides control over
your system, including safe shutdown to park your RAID drives and power
off.

The system includes a capable power supply to ensure that your system is
well fuelled, even under heavy loads.

RockyRAID comes equipped with 4GB RAM, and can handle over 4 TB of SSD
storage if needed.

With next generation ARM boards being 64bit-only on their fast cores, we
feel the RK3399 represents one of the best platforms for 32bit ARM
computing, and Rocky demonstrates this well. He certainly knocked our
socks off!

Rocky will be debuting at the Wakefield-in-Bradford show, and yes, you'll
be able to see his drives pulled out live! Poor little guy!
(Spoiler - he loves showing off).

Best wishes,

Andrew

--
R-Comp
22 Robert Moffat, High Legh, Knutsford, Cheshire WA16 6PS
Tel: 01925 755043 Fax: 01925 757377 http://www.rcomp.co.uk


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