This is a short summary of my experience with my newly obtained Banana Pi M3 (v.1.2) board. I am touching on the following topics, Operating systems Installing an OS on the internal eMMC storage (no SD cards finally!) Expanding the file system to the whole eMMC size The Hardware What power supply to get Read & Write speeds from/to 2.5" HDD Encrypted containers and their speeds Temperatures Passive cooling with heat sink Forced cooling with a small USB fan Controlling CPU frequency to limit heat generation So three weeks ago on Thursday I have received my Banana Pi M3 v.1.2 board. In my excitement - despite not having slept enough for the previous 2 weeks - I have started to write OS .img files to different SD cards to quickly try out my new toy before going to bed. Well, long story short I have managed to dd my laptops / (/home was on a separate partition, so it was not a major issue, but still annoying). To reinstall so I had to burn some of those DVD things that were s...