I must say that $300 for adding this SBC and SSD is steep. The 'hashboard only' option can be acquired for $524.99 right now, whereas the 'full unit' runs you $824.99. Buying an Orange Pi 4 and the exact same SSD right now, runs you pretty exactly $200, so it's a 50% premium. I'm not sure if you can just buy those yourself and mount them into a 'hashboard only' unit, or if there are missing mounting spots or holes on those. But from pictures, they look exactly the same. Just throwing an idea out there.
Just saw this thread, thanks for the honest review. I do want to provide transparency whenever I can especially when it comes to comments like above when most people have no idea costs/development involved with a product like this.
We call it "our" controller because it truly is, and there is nothing else on the market that even comes close to its performance for a Pi sized computer and thats mostly from the innovation with our custom SSD controller. AFAIK its the only SBC on the market that has 1TB R/W speeds which is why its so much faster than a PI when syncing. Sure the base board is off the shelf (we have custom changes to this as well), but we put in a lot of work to the overall system with the SSD components.
Pricing, here is the our overall bulk costs we paid for Batch 2 and 3 for these components
SBC:95
SSD:90
SD Card: 9
Custom SSD card: 19
Heatsinks/Fans/Wire harnesses and other small components: 25
Thats 240 and does not include imports costs/shipping costs/assembly/R&D etc etc.
When all that is factored in we actually make a net loss on the full node units in relation to its price premium. The little profit we make is from the hashing unit itself. 300 is a steal for what you get, especially when compared to other full node only competitors.
FYI most of the other issues especially around upgrade the base OS and security issues have been fixed in the latest image release.