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Yep. USB disks also are generally much more robust to errors than SD cards. My mail spool is on USB, the OS is on the SD card.
by jacobush 7y ago
Yep. USB disks also are generally much more robust to errors than SD cards. My mail spool is on USB, the OS is on the SD card.
- geerlingguy 7y agoSoon (hopefully) the Pi 4 will be able to completely boot off USB 3.0 devices; right now you can partially boot off an external volume, but /boot still has to be on a microSD card. Though in my testing, it's still not a night-and-day performance difference, if judged by the Pi 3B+. I am not sure if the Pi 4's USB 3.0 port bandwidth will give that much of an improvement. It would be quite nice to have any form of drive supported more directly, NVMe, m.2, whatever.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoDoes /boot get read/written to enough where this is not "good enough"
- geerlingguy 7y agoIt doesn't, but in my informal tests (I haven't had time to set up a thorough benchmark) real-world usage of an external USB 3.0 SSD (testing with a cheap Kingston SSD, though, and a cheap USB SATA interface) is only marginally faster than a Samsung Evo+ microSD card.
- kup0 7y agoI wonder if this is also due to the fact that many desktop SSDs do not focus on 4k read/write performance. This is one big area where nvme SSDs seem to have an advantage, their 4k read/write is usually significantly higher than that of other SSDs (at least from benchmarks I've seen). Maybe even a lower end nvme ssd + usb enclosure would be the way to go to get the best performance. Unless there's something about the USB interface itself that kills random 4k r/w performance?
- geerlingguy 7y agoTrue; some of the cheapest SSDs I've tested seem to just be the same package that would be inside a USB flash drive or SD card, hardwired to an SATA plug in a giant 2.5" enclosure!