ODROID-M1S Lite Is a $60 SBC With NVMe and 2036 Supply

Hardkernel Trims the ODROID-M1S to $60

Hardkernel has launched the ODROID-M1S Lite, a cost-reduced version of its Rockchip RK3566 board that keeps the feature most cheap SBCs skip: a real M.2 NVMe slot. At $60 for the board, it is one of the more affordable ways to put a solid-state drive under a quiet, low-power Linux machine, and the South Korean maker is backing it with a supply commitment that runs a full decade.

• SoC: Rockchip RK3566 with four Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.8GHz, a Mali-G52 GPU and a 0.8 TOPS NPU
• Memory and storage: 2GB LPDDR4 and 32GB of soldered eMMC, plus microSD and M.2 NVMe over PCIe 2.1 x1
• Price: $60, without case or power supply; a 5V/3A USB-C adapter adds $5
• Longevity: Hardkernel says it will supply the board until at least 2036

What Is Different From the Regular ODROID-M1S?

The standard M1S ships with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC. The Lite halves the storage and drops to 2GB of memory, and it arrives without a case or power adapter in the box. The GPIO headers are optional too: the 40-pin and 14-pin headers are an add-on, exposing UART, I2C, SPI, PWM, ADC, USB 2.0 and analog audio when fitted.

Everything else is the M1S you may already know. There is one Gigabit Ethernet port on a Realtek RTL8211F, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, micro-USB OTG, HDMI 2.0 at up to 4K60, and a four-lane MIPI-DSI connector for Hardkernel's touchscreen kits. The board measures 90 x 65 x 16mm and weighs 52g with its heatsink.

How Much Power Does the ODROID-M1S Lite Draw?

This is where the RK3566 earns its keep. Hardkernel's own measurements put headless idle at about 1W, a desktop sitting idle at about 1.5W, a CPU stress test at about 3.52W, and the peak during boot at about 3.7W. That is always-on territory: a year of headless idle costs less than a takeaway coffee in electricity.

Thermals are equally relaxed. With only the stock passive heatsink, Hardkernel reports the CPU stayed below 65°C under sustained load at room temperature, and below 75°C inside a case without thermal throttling. No fan means no noise, which matters for a box that lives on a bookshelf.

What Can You Run on a 2GB Single Board Computer?

Be realistic about the 2GB ceiling. This is not a local LLM machine or a desktop replacement. It is a strong fit for the jobs where an NVMe drive matters more than RAM: a Pi-hole or DNS server, a lightweight file share, a Home Assistant node, a network monitor, a small web server, or a kiosk driving an HDMI display. The NVMe slot is the upgrade that counts here, since running the system from an SSD is both faster and far kinder to write-heavy services than a microSD card.

Official images cover Android 11 and Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 LTS, with drivers for the Mali GPU, MIPI-DSI, GPIO and the NPU. Those Ubuntu releases are older than the newest options on some rival boards, so check that your software stack is happy there before you order.

The 2036 promise is the quiet headline. For anyone designing a product or a long-lived install around an SBC, a decade of guaranteed supply is worth more than a spec-sheet bump. Hardkernel's x86 side has taken a very different path, as our look at the ODROID-H5 homelab board shows, and for an even cheaper Rockchip option see the $20 NanoPi R28S. More boards in our mini computer coverage.

Sources: Hardkernel ODROID-M1S Lite product page — September 2026; LinuxGizmos — September 8, 2026.