4 ms·

The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even running a

The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even running apt-get update took forever.

geerlingguy 11y ago
I hope to get a card for the ODROID and run some of these tests again... Should've ordered it with my initial purchase so I don't have to spend another $7 on shipping! Judging by the built-in eMMC on the Orange Pi, it's a substantial I/O boost, at least 4-8x faster than even the best microSD card.
- avian 11y ago
  It would also be interesting to know how eMMC compares to the SATA interface that used to be available on old Allwinner SoCs before they canned it. I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.
  - chx 11y ago
    Explain this to me as one hackernews reader to another: how come people are buying Allwinner stuff? Are you not aware of the repeated GPL violations or do you think undermining all of our work is not enough of a problem to warrant a boycott?
    - geerlingguy 11y ago
      For me, I bought one Allwinner board (Orange Pi Plus) just to see how the experience/software/etc. compared to the others... and it was a terrible experience. So that mixed with the iffy licensing[1], I don't see a bright future for their chips/mainstream acceptance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9112094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9112094
    - tagrun 11y ago
      Extending this logic, we should also avoid anything from China or any country with an oppressive regime, which have repeatedly been violating human rights (which I think is more important that violation of a software license). In fact, if we're talking ethics and politics now, there's also labor, abuse of workers and local people losing their jobs to cheap overseas workers issues.
    - avian 11y ago
      In fact no, I was not aware of Allwinner GPL violations when I was buying it (which was about 2 years ago). If I knew about them, it might have affected my decision. I publish most of my software under GPL (check my blog and GitHub accounts), so I'm definitely not ambivalent to GPL violations. Then again, I don't have time these days to thoroughly research ideological aspects of all the stuff I buy. I bought a CubieTruck, not a tray of Allwinner chips. I'm sure that if you looked up track records of all supliers involved in any hardware product these days, you would find plenty that violated GPL at some point. I admire people that can say that they checked everything and that their laptops don't run any binary blobs and have no relations to known copyleft violators. I simply think my time is better spent in other pursuits.
satbyy 11y ago
I switched the / (root) partition on the Pi to a USB pen drive. Only /boot is on the SD card. Not sure how it compares to eMMC but certainly faster than micro SD card. [1]: https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/10/speed-up-your-pi-by-booting-to-a-usb-flash-drive https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/10/speed-up-your-pi-by-booting-t...
shrugger 11y ago
I had an XU3, and the eMMC pretty much justified the entire cost of the setup for me. Boots practically instantly, rw was insane, I had a crap connection so updates sucked, but like installing from tarballs was super quick. It's a neat little device. I had a real-hard time getting Android working properly, but it was well worth the effort once it was.
Sephr 11y ago
Some SD cards are about the same speed as high-end eMMC cards (300MB/s+ sequential read)
Kankuro 11y ago
I bought a odroid-X2 with a eMMC chip 3 years ago and it is more than ok for a "simple" use (hosting my contacts, calendar and RSS for example). But for inserting in bulk 25000 (small) records a day in a Postgres DB it was really slow. When I had to reinitialize the DB from the raw data, it took so long (7 millions records) that I moved the DB to my desktop and let the downloading part on the odroid. I read that faster eMMC chips were released, but I don't have any figure.

The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even running apt-get update took forever.

geerlingguy 11y ago

I hope to get a card for the ODROID and run some of these tests again... Should've ordered it with my initial purchase so I don't have to spend another $7 on shipping! Judging by the built-in eMMC on the Orange Pi, it's a substantial I/O boost, at least 4-8x faster than even the best microSD card.

avian 11y ago
It would also be interesting to know how eMMC compares to the SATA interface that used to be available on old Allwinner SoCs before they canned it. I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.
- chx 11y ago
  Explain this to me as one hackernews reader to another: how come people are buying Allwinner stuff? Are you not aware of the repeated GPL violations or do you think undermining all of our work is not enough of a problem to warrant a boycott?
  - geerlingguy 11y ago
    For me, I bought one Allwinner board (Orange Pi Plus) just to see how the experience/software/etc. compared to the others... and it was a terrible experience. So that mixed with the iffy licensing[1], I don't see a bright future for their chips/mainstream acceptance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9112094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9112094
  - tagrun 11y ago
    Extending this logic, we should also avoid anything from China or any country with an oppressive regime, which have repeatedly been violating human rights (which I think is more important that violation of a software license). In fact, if we're talking ethics and politics now, there's also labor, abuse of workers and local people losing their jobs to cheap overseas workers issues.
  - avian 11y ago
    In fact no, I was not aware of Allwinner GPL violations when I was buying it (which was about 2 years ago). If I knew about them, it might have affected my decision. I publish most of my software under GPL (check my blog and GitHub accounts), so I'm definitely not ambivalent to GPL violations. Then again, I don't have time these days to thoroughly research ideological aspects of all the stuff I buy. I bought a CubieTruck, not a tray of Allwinner chips. I'm sure that if you looked up track records of all supliers involved in any hardware product these days, you would find plenty that violated GPL at some point. I admire people that can say that they checked everything and that their laptops don't run any binary blobs and have no relations to known copyleft violators. I simply think my time is better spent in other pursuits.

satbyy 11y ago

I switched the / (root) partition on the Pi to a USB pen drive. Only /boot is on the SD card. Not sure how it compares to eMMC but certainly faster than micro SD card. [1]: https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/10/speed-up-your-pi-by-booting-to-a-usb-flash-drive https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/10/speed-up-your-pi-by-booting-t...

shrugger 11y ago

I had an XU3, and the eMMC pretty much justified the entire cost of the setup for me. Boots practically instantly, rw was insane, I had a crap connection so updates sucked, but like installing from tarballs was super quick. It's a neat little device. I had a real-hard time getting Android working properly, but it was well worth the effort once it was.

Sephr 11y ago

Some SD cards are about the same speed as high-end eMMC cards (300MB/s+ sequential read)

Kankuro 11y ago

I bought a odroid-X2 with a eMMC chip 3 years ago and it is more than ok for a "simple" use (hosting my contacts, calendar and RSS for example). But for inserting in bulk 25000 (small) records a day in a Postgres DB it was really slow. When I had to reinitialize the DB from the raw data, it took so long (7 millions records) that I moved the DB to my desktop and let the downloading part on the odroid. I read that faster eMMC chips were released, but I don't have any figure.