7 ms·

The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. It's pretty impressive and more attention

by Ijumfs 6y ago

The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. It's pretty impressive and more attention is being paid to it as a first-class computing platform as time goes on. Our desktop monoculture has led to serious security problems and massive stagnation at least until recently. Even if you don't use a Pi you should be thankful that they exist.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  > The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.
  - Zenst 6y ago
    there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-Inch-Expansion/dp/B077JK3TYZ https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC. Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement. I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly. Mess of cabling: lol!
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc. I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.
    - burfog 6y ago
      It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB. Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics. In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...
  - nerdbeere 6y ago
    Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM. When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine. https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-up-to-an-amd-ryzen-7-4800u-processor.html https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...
    - vondur 6y ago
      The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?
    - drcross 6y ago
      x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.
  - thebruce87m 6y ago
    The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine: Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profile-Cooler/dp/B075SG1T3X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi... ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chassis/dp/B01N8ZNJ3U/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=asrock+usb&qid=1571139456&s=computers&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas... AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Antennas/dp/B07PDTNSYS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a300+wifi&qid=1570697428&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten... 2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-Module/dp/B07B61GLP1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=AD4S2666316G19&qid=1570698649&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-... Price a few months ago - £619.68 Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.
Narishma 6y ago
> The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. Even the Pi 3 was already good enough for most of those use cases. The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.
- floatboth 6y ago
  The Cortex-A53 is really weak. I wouldn't want to run an office suite on that either. Oh, and the Pi 3 was VERY limited by RAM. "most office people, students, and so on" pretty much always do browse lots of modern websites, at the same time as running an office suite, audio player, and more stuff. The A72 is really the "minimum viable CPU core" for desktop usage. Anything with less single-core performance is absolute hell and suffering.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    The CM 3+ (which is clocked at 1.2 GHz but is same in other ways to the Pi B 3+ which is 1.4 GHz) is less than half as fast as the Pi 4 in most CPU tasks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-episode-5-benchmarking-turing-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-...
  - megous 6y ago
    Not true. I barely notice any difference between my Orange Pi 3 (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz) and my Ivy Bridge workstation, when browsing the web, and things like that. I don't run a heavy weight desktop though. The only noticeable thing is some increased latency (mainly due to storage speed limited to 20MiB/s read speeds), but animations and scrolling and basic stuff like that are pretty much smooth. I could easily run the system from USB attached SSD (which can achieve 15-20x the speeds of the SD card), and that would massively improve app startup speeds too. Also video playback sucks, but that's mainly due to software support, not a hardware issue. It's a chip meant for TV boxes after all. I wouldn't use it to compile programs, but office work? I can imagine that easily.
- miked85 6y ago
  > The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites. So, the most common use case for a desktop computer?
mixmastamyk 6y ago
It should be and is decent, but when we tried we ran into numerous paper-cuts: - Needed to set up NTP to set the clock, it was always wrong. - It can't power down through software, so you have to shut down and then hit the power switch like it's 1990. - Audio was a mess and had to spend hours researching how to write and edit a bunch of config files to make it predictable. - The weird set up program means you need to do a lot of googling on how to fix issues in a non-standard to linux way. It mostly works however. - Raspbian feels not quite "finished." Was much happier with Ubuntu Mate, as they fixed 99% of the paper cuts like audio already, but it doesn't support the 4 yet. In short, it is a bit too cheap. I would have definitely spent another dollar to see these hardware issues fixed. Or dropped the CPU speed a hundred MHZ, whatever it takes. In the end, a friend gave us a ten-year-old used iMac for free. I installed Ubuntu Mate on it and it had none of the above problems. It's even a touch faster.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  A touch faster? The slowest 2010 iMac is the 21" with an i3-540 Dual core CPU, Geekbench 4 is 2211 single/4466 multi. The Pi 4 is around 970/2000, less than half the performance. The Pi 4 has come a long way in speed since the lowly original Pi, but its still not even close to a 10 year old desktop PC (or iMac).
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    More people (even in 2010) used laptops than desktops, and the Pi is in line with the numbers from the cheaper MacBook Airs at the time (I still have one that runs... though it’s getting some weird green lines on the display). But I can say that working on the 2010 MBA is not fun; one of my webcams doesn’t even work with it (choppy at 30p), zoom is... slow at best, and web browsing is a bit choppy even with ad blockers. Even then, it is a smoother overall experience with that hardware and macOS than when I was testing 64-bit Pi OS on the 8 GB Pi 4 a few weeks ago: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I tried to use the pi 4 as a nextcloud server and found it to be unbearably slow. Not sure what caused it but I suspect the sd card speed.
- swebs 6y ago
  I also had a recent install that was unbearably slow. It turns out that the SD card was corrupted. Raspberry Pi OS comes with a SD card checking utility you can use to check. Replacing it with a new class 10 card made it fast again.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    You can boot from USB now. No need for SD.
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    You should also go for at least Application Performance Class 1.
- 0ld 6y ago
  browsing media is still unusably slow on usb3 hdd as well. once it starts generating previews, youre done. pre-generating doesnt help much been using it for photo sync only, works fine enough as long as youre not using the web interface
  - delfinom 6y ago
    Did you try it using a UASP USB3 HDD though?
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    That was my issue. Images would take 3-10 seconds to show in the UI. Once I moved to a ryzen 5 server I was seeing everything load like it was local.
regularfry 6y ago
For my money they've pushed a fraction too hard on the CPU power. One of the best things for me about the 3 is that you don't need to worry about cooling the way you do with the 4. I get why, there's a huge demand for the 4 to be able to handle proper desktop applications, but I'd love to see a version that has the thermal characteristics of the 3 with the IO updates of the 4.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mschuster91 6y ago
  I'd actually like a new version of the Compute Module with the PCI-e lanes exposed (the more the better). That would be a real game changer for NAS systems. Or, for both CM and the full RPi, a docking header and a corresponding tiny module for a real-time clock module if not outright embed one. It's 2020 ffs.
- hajile 6y ago
  It's the price of that ancient 28nm manufacturing.

by Ijumfs 6y ago

geerlingguy 6y ago

The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)

tlrobinson 6y ago
> The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.
- Zenst 6y ago
  there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-Inch-Expansion/dp/B077JK3TYZ https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).
- gerdesj 6y ago
  I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC. Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement. I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly. Mess of cabling: lol!
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination. Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc. I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.
  - burfog 6y ago
    It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB. Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics. In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.
- rcarmo 6y ago
  NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.
pedrocr 6y ago
At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny/ThinkCentre_M75q_Tiny_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...
- nerdbeere 6y ago
  Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM. When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine. https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-up-to-an-amd-ryzen-7-4800u-processor.html https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...
  - vondur 6y ago
    The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?
  - drcross 6y ago
    x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.
- thebruce87m 6y ago
  The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine: Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profile-Cooler/dp/B075SG1T3X https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi... ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chassis/dp/B01N8ZNJ3U/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=asrock+usb&qid=1571139456&s=computers&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas... AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1 ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21 ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Antennas/dp/B07PDTNSYS/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=a300+wifi&qid=1570697428&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten... 2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-Module/dp/B07B61GLP1/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=AD4S2666316G19&qid=1570698649&s=computers&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-... Price a few months ago - £619.68 Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.

Narishma 6y ago

> The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. Even the Pi 3 was already good enough for most of those use cases. The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.

floatboth 6y ago
The Cortex-A53 is really weak. I wouldn't want to run an office suite on that either. Oh, and the Pi 3 was VERY limited by RAM. "most office people, students, and so on" pretty much always do browse lots of modern websites, at the same time as running an office suite, audio player, and more stuff. The A72 is really the "minimum viable CPU core" for desktop usage. Anything with less single-core performance is absolute hell and suffering.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The CM 3+ (which is clocked at 1.2 GHz but is same in other ways to the Pi B 3+ which is 1.4 GHz) is less than half as fast as the Pi 4 in most CPU tasks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-episode-5-benchmarking-turing-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-...
- megous 6y ago
  Not true. I barely notice any difference between my Orange Pi 3 (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz) and my Ivy Bridge workstation, when browsing the web, and things like that. I don't run a heavy weight desktop though. The only noticeable thing is some increased latency (mainly due to storage speed limited to 20MiB/s read speeds), but animations and scrolling and basic stuff like that are pretty much smooth. I could easily run the system from USB attached SSD (which can achieve 15-20x the speeds of the SD card), and that would massively improve app startup speeds too. Also video playback sucks, but that's mainly due to software support, not a hardware issue. It's a chip meant for TV boxes after all. I wouldn't use it to compile programs, but office work? I can imagine that easily.
miked85 6y ago
> The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites. So, the most common use case for a desktop computer?

mixmastamyk 6y ago

It should be and is decent, but when we tried we ran into numerous paper-cuts: - Needed to set up NTP to set the clock, it was always wrong. - It can't power down through software, so you have to shut down and then hit the power switch like it's 1990. - Audio was a mess and had to spend hours researching how to write and edit a bunch of config files to make it predictable. - The weird set up program means you need to do a lot of googling on how to fix issues in a non-standard to linux way. It mostly works however. - Raspbian feels not quite "finished." Was much happier with Ubuntu Mate, as they fixed 99% of the paper cuts like audio already, but it doesn't support the 4 yet. In short, it is a bit too cheap. I would have definitely spent another dollar to see these hardware issues fixed. Or dropped the CPU speed a hundred MHZ, whatever it takes. In the end, a friend gave us a ten-year-old used iMac for free. I installed Ubuntu Mate on it and it had none of the above problems. It's even a touch faster.

sgerenser 6y ago
A touch faster? The slowest 2010 iMac is the 21" with an i3-540 Dual core CPU, Geekbench 4 is 2211 single/4466 multi. The Pi 4 is around 970/2000, less than half the performance. The Pi 4 has come a long way in speed since the lowly original Pi, but its still not even close to a 10 year old desktop PC (or iMac).
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  More people (even in 2010) used laptops than desktops, and the Pi is in line with the numbers from the cheaper MacBook Airs at the time (I still have one that runs... though it’s getting some weird green lines on the display). But I can say that working on the 2010 MBA is not fun; one of my webcams doesn’t even work with it (choppy at 30p), zoom is... slow at best, and web browsing is a bit choppy even with ad blockers. Even then, it is a smoother overall experience with that hardware and macOS than when I was testing 64-bit Pi OS on the 8 GB Pi 4 a few weeks ago: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...
- mixmastamyk 6y ago

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

I tried to use the pi 4 as a nextcloud server and found it to be unbearably slow. Not sure what caused it but I suspect the sd card speed.

swebs 6y ago
I also had a recent install that was unbearably slow. It turns out that the SD card was corrupted. Raspberry Pi OS comes with a SD card checking utility you can use to check. Replacing it with a new class 10 card made it fast again.
- sixothree 6y ago
  You can boot from USB now. No need for SD.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  You should also go for at least Application Performance Class 1.
0ld 6y ago
browsing media is still unusably slow on usb3 hdd as well. once it starts generating previews, youre done. pre-generating doesnt help much been using it for photo sync only, works fine enough as long as youre not using the web interface
- delfinom 6y ago
  Did you try it using a UASP USB3 HDD though?
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  That was my issue. Images would take 3-10 seconds to show in the UI. Once I moved to a ryzen 5 server I was seeing everything load like it was local.

regularfry 6y ago

For my money they've pushed a fraction too hard on the CPU power. One of the best things for me about the 3 is that you don't need to worry about cooling the way you do with the 4. I get why, there's a huge demand for the 4 to be able to handle proper desktop applications, but I'd love to see a version that has the thermal characteristics of the 3 with the IO updates of the 4.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 6y ago
I'd actually like a new version of the Compute Module with the PCI-e lanes exposed (the more the better). That would be a real game changer for NAS systems. Or, for both CM and the full RPi, a docking header and a corresponding tiny module for a real-time clock module if not outright embed one. It's 2020 ffs.
hajile 6y ago
It's the price of that ancient 28nm manufacturing.