The little ROCK 4 SE is a board with a bit of heritage behind it. Radxa have been making different flavours of this board with a variety of processors and peripherals for several years. Also - it's in stock, which puts it way higher up the desirability level than the Pi or CM4, where you have to play hunt the board, sometimes for weeks to get one.

Why only three stars then? Well, mostly because it's a bit inflexible in its current incarnation. The only option is the 4gb version. The Radxa ROCK 5 is already announced, with evaluation boards already in the wild and general availability expected in the next few weeks/months. It sports an extra 2 fast cores (bringing the total to 4 "big" cores and 4 "small" cores, and memory options of 4gb, 8gb or 16gb, plus 2.5gb Ethernet and a bunch of other upgrades. From that perspective then, you're buying a slightly older design, and a lower specification but that is available now and is cheaper than the ROCK 5 will be.

There are some other quirks. Storage initially looks good - there are three options - SD card, eMMC or an M.2 NVME socket, however my initial excitement died a little when I realized that the M.2 socket is in a REALLY odd place on the board - it's on the bottom of the board, on one of the shorter edges, but it faces outwards which means that the NVME drive literally sticks out like a sore thumb, nearly doubling the length of the board.

It couldn't have been mounted the other way because it would have sat directly above the processor. It's a bizarre, and not really viable solution. There is a fix though - an expansion card that mounts on top of the board and flips the socket over so the overhang on a 2280 card is much smaller, although it does still stick out a bit but it's not sold in the UK at the moment, so you'll have to buy from China or USA if you want usable NVME.

On to the eMMC then, and again, eMMC is generally faster and more reliable than SD card, so a fair backup option in the absence of NVME. Except that the eMMC connector chip is specifically designed to fit specific 38pin/30pin high density connectors which aren't available in the UK, so again it's off to China or USA if you want to use eMMC. Plus eMMC is expensive, so not really great as a "one and only" drive. You do have some USB 3 ports too, so USB storage is an option, but I don't think the ROCK 4 can boot from USB drives (or I haven't worked out yet how to make it work).

So then, that just leaves SD cards. I've had enough SD cards fail on me over the years that I wouldn't consider them as viable OS drives for anything but the most trivial of projects, but as of right now, that's really your only option to get started. I have been in contact with the OKDO technical team, and they acknowledged the storage shortcomings and are looking at options to address them, but they aren't available today.

Summary: A useful little board, with more cores than a Raspberry Pi 4 but fixed at 4gb RAM, limited storage options at the moment, but in stock and not outrageously priced.

Following on from my previous review, I see that OKdo now stock the necessary eMMC memory to accompany this board, so my review goes up to a solid 4 stars. If the NVME expansion board arrives in stock too this would be a stand-out 5 star review (cost/value against the now shipping Rock 5 which is much more capable but >2x the price.)