Just got a VeloCloud EDGE 500-N. It has 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD and the Ethernet ports are all off from Marvell chips. An 88E6176 switch seems to drive the lan ports and an 88E6320 drive the 2 Internet ports and along with an 88E1112 the SFP port.
I have a backlog of equipment to catch up on but I will be eventually adding info to WikiDev for this and then loading OpenWrt.
This is about the roqos rc10. Anyway, I tested the HDD enclosure with external power, but it doesn't connect with a bad cable blahblah message. Even if I connect another USB 3.0 stick, it does not connect with an error message. Perhaps a hardware failure.
Shipping isn't the problem, VAT, and (if applied) customs charges, plus carrier's
"admin charges" might be.
But those vary from country to country, and carrier to carrier.
Lesson (at least for me) is never to use the big carriers - FedEx, DHL, TNT & UPS when importing goods from outside Europe, their admin charges are very high (esp since it's a digital transaction, not touched by any human), unless the value of the parcel itself is very low.
Then I tried a 2.5" 500GB HDD, it didn't even try to spin up.
So the port's either underpowered, or there's some quirk that needs to
be enabled, to get proper power to it.
I can't get them (for a reasonable price, with shipping, customs, etc.) over here (.de), but the vendor would have seriously messed up the hardware design, if they'd achieve less than >>800 MBit/s (I would even assume 1 GBit/s) on a Rangeley Atom C2358 (at least running OpenWrt). I would totally expect them to have messed up their 'cloud' firmware though (never checked their promised features, IDS and similar could explain those values).
Disclaimer, I only found references to the hardware specifications while searching for potential (cheap) targets, I never had one on my desk.
I've never ever used it, and it sounds pretty expensive to me, but if the shipping doesn't double with
the no of items bought, I can see it becomes tempting with an increasing number of units.
Also not really interested in buying that many whatever of the same kind, the local market's to small, it would be hard to (re)sell them.
I'm happy if the one I keep for myself is free, not really trying to make a buck.
I think the five sw301da I bought in US, ended up at ~30€/piece including shipping, VAT, tax etc, to .se.
yes I agree. It's just an example to show an item that is using global shipping program.
If I didn't do that for shipping to italy I would get 30 euro of "administrative fees" which is more or less a fixed cost, plus a VAT calculated on some strange and unknown item value (commonly item+shipping cost).
it's obviously calculated per total price so it increases if you buy multiple items. As said above this is just an example of item offering GSP, not a good item to buy
If the item didn't suck, paying only 20$ of import fees for a 30$ item isn't bad at all for Italy since as said above it's not just VAT but also "administrative fee" that is high for no reason and also the risk of getting some creative customs officer that decides the "real price" of the item is 3 times the price I actually paid so I nearly end up paying more in VAT/import fees than the item.
Also the fact that it's not going through customs at all so it's not held by customs for no reason. As another example, I only recently received a PiKVM board/case I bought as part of a kickstarter, that was shipped in december from Hong Kong and was held in customs for like 1 month and a half for no discernible reason
I had the same experience with a couple of gifts sent outside of EU. They were waiting in the customs for more than a month. Then they sent me the form to fill in, so that post office will handle the customs clearance, and after another week they arrived at home without extra charges. So I guess it was the Christmas season high workload along with the new rules that all packages from outside EU must pass customs.
I currently really have no need or purpose for yet another X86-based device (as you know ). But, oh boy, the Velocloud 520 integrating a presumably quite capable passive Atom CPU, AC wireless and an 8-port switch does sound mighty tempting.
... for $50 that is. For more than twice that price after shipping, import fees and taxes decidedly less so. I guess that's what we have to live with. US getting dirt cheap capable X86 devices, Japan getting dirt cheap capable funky consumer routers and access points, and us in the EU getting cheap-ish decommissioned "professional" firewall appliances, with pretty much no cross-pollenation.