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Can we please have a Pi without a crappy storage interface. It's either a microSD card or something dangling off USB. An M2 SATA or NVMe would make this credibl
by qz2 6y ago
Can we please have a Pi without a crappy storage interface. It's either a microSD card or something dangling off USB. An M2 SATA or NVMe would make this credible but 99% of the problems I've had with the Pi platform is storage related, either being knackered microSD cards, terrible performance or USB power problems.
- ejolto 6y agoSounds like you're not the target audience for a RPi. They are meant to be cheap computers for "the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries"[0]. Adding NVMe support would increase the price. There are alternatives to RPi that do what you want, odroid-h2plus for example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
- qz2 6y agoSchools don't want to be debugging microSD and USB issues.
- krageon 6y agoExcept these problems don't occur for most people, as evidenced by the fact that the current system works fine. Complaints like yours are relatively rare.
- qz2 6y agoRubbish. They do. My daughter's school has a pile of knackered Pi's that the teachers don't have the time and budget to fix. Broken connectors, duff microSDs, bricks. They don't use them now, preferring python on windows.
- chaos_a 6y agosounds like people simply weren't taking any care of them, that's why they broke. If they had cases and decent sd cards that probably wouldn't have happened.
- qz2 6y agoSchool computers take a beating. That's why the two are incompatible.
- rbanffy 6y agoThat's one of the reasons the Apple II was so popular with schools. It was built like a tank.
- conjectures 6y agoToo many kids, that's the problem with schools these days.
- jon-wood 6y agoI’m responsible for a fleet of a few hundred Raspberry Pis being used as home monitoring hubs - they use high grade SD cards, and are configured to write as little as possible while still fulfilling their function, yet we still see one or two a month fall of the internet because of SD card corruption. This is absolutely a problem. I believe the compute module is somewhat better in that it uses eMMC rather than SD cards.
- krageon 6y agoI'm sure your experiences are legitimate, just like mine for similar usage profiles are. My only conclusion can be that it's not the hardware itself that's the problem, unless we allow for the possibility that it's different batching. Unlikely, but not unthinkable.
- deeringc 6y agoBut we've already established that these are meant for "the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries". In these situations with young, untrained hands, durability and robustness are absolutely key criteria. It's not good value if it ends up discarded/broken due to additional complexity or a fault.
- krageon 6y agoI did mention "similar usage profiles"
- throwaway894345 6y agoOr maybe you're using Pis in ways that aren't so hard on SD cards, etc? It seems very likely that this is the case given that these users experience these issues on Pis but not other systems.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoProbably as the pi was designed for 6th formers to use - letting 8-10 year olds lose on them :-)
- qz2 6y agoNo all GCSE so 14+ students. The issue is usually that they freeze or crash under "desktop use" all the time and people pull the power out and back in again to reset them. This flexes the HDMI and USB connectors which eventually break or the cables give out. During the reboot cycle is when the SD card gets borked, or randomly suddenly. It's really a terrible computing experience compared to using a simple off the shelf windows box running python with full single-sign-on to GCPW. They don't crash and the cables are never yanked around because they are AIO boxes and the storage never goes wonky. Teachers prefer them because the first 30 minutes of a 80 minute slot isn't getting 30 raspberry pi's limping again.
- ddalex 6y agoThese are classic symptoms of underpowered PIs. 99% of USB power supplies are not fit for a PI :(
- qz2 6y agoYeah see my original comment about USB power problems :)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoSo that raises the question: Why do they keep making Pis with USB power? One could argue that it's because USB power supplies are cheap and ubiquitous, but that's not really true if only 1% of power supplies are actually capable of properly powering a Pi. They could use a different power connector that doesn't cause this confusion, or they could design Pis to use less power and therefore work properly with more USB power supplies.
- derefr 6y ago
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoTell them to give them to me. I'll pay for S&H
- derefr 6y ago> duff microSDs Do you mean the microSD cards tend to wear out, or that they’re DOA? If the former — I’m pretty sure there’s an option to load RaspberryOS into a RAM-resident mode (like a live CD) where regular OS usage won’t hit the disk at all, and only a “Local Documents” partition is mounted writable, with nothing configured to implicitly write to it by default. If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it. > broken connectors The microSD connector? In an educational context, that shouldn’t be end-user exposed. It’s essentially a maintenance port. Stick some tape over it. In the computer labs of the 90s, kids would break the CD-ROM drive trays, too. MDM software was developed that would, among other things, lock out the CD-tray eject mechanism unless/until a teacher enabled it (presumably for working through some whole-class “multimedia” product that never materialized, because who’d trust kids to insert the CDs?)
- wtallis 6y ago> If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it. SD cards and USB flash drives are manufactured with lower-grade flash memory than SATA and NVMe SSDs. The stuff that wears out in RPi usage is the stuff that was rejected for desktop usage. So having a large failure rate is not the only option, if you can expose a SATA or PCIe port. It's a little disappointing that they cannot even offer end users that upgrade path.
- Uberphallus 6y agoI've had all RPi versions except RPi4, running at least 1 of them 24/7 since the first one was released, and by the first year I had a cron that dd'd the card every night, and I found myself dding the backup image at least 2-3 times per year. RPi3+ has had no problem so far, and I'm not upgrading to RPi4 out of fear of it becoming an unstable mess again.
- jiofih 6y agoSchools are not running 24/7 servers from them.
- Uberphallus 6y agoSchools may have a lab with 30, used 2h per day, makes it more than double my failure rate. Add kids popping the cards in and out all the time and you have a recipe for disaster.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoSchools are, however, probably power-cycling the Pi daily, and power-cycling can be just as detrimental to an SD card.
- _trampeltier 6y agoI did run Boinc on over 20 different SBCs for 2 or 3 years. So they run 24/7 with 100% and I just had 2 broken SD cards from all those SBCs. I guess thats fine.
- qwertox 6y ago> Complaints like yours are relatively rare. I've stopped complaining because I already know how the issue manifests and how to solve it. A SD-card is not a proper replacement for a drive, it's a fine storage medium.
- wott 6y agoAs far as I am concerned, I consider SD cards the equivalent of a floppy disk. The equivalent of a hard drive would then be a CF card (unfortunately much less common than SD cards these days). Or of course any USB drive if we give up on the card format/connection style.
- numpad0 6y agoModern day CF replacement is CFexpress. PCIe 3.0 x1 NVMe, forward compatible with XQD.
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y agoYeah but RPi SoC is apparently lacking in PCIe lanes. I think they need a different SoC so they can finally have ethernet/storage/usb controller on the PCIe bus.
- lmns 6y agoHow do you know that complaints about the storage system are rare?
- sgt 6y agoI think that's because "most people" who buy a Raspberry PI use it once or twice then it lies in a drawer somewhere. In my experience, if you actively use it for something, you'll get into annoying problems like that, it's just a matter of time and how much you are hitting that SD card, or how many times you unplug it without shutting down the Pi properly.
- aembleton 6y agoI've had my Pi 3 running constantly for the last three years as a Plex server. The only thing that has gone wrong is the Western Digital hard disk drive that failed. The Pi itself and even the microSD card have been fine.
- tobias3 6y agoThere is a sticky thread in the forums and such threads are always just the tip of the iceberg: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 My guess: The VL805 USB 3.0 UAS is broken.
- stevehawk 6y agoI think you’re confusing your lack of knowledge of the commonality of this with the assumption that it is rare. I don’t know anyone who expects a Pi with SD to last more than a year. And the “solution” is always to buy the more expensive SD cards that last longer. And that’s not a solution. It’s time for Raspberry to give up the SD card for a real form factor. I can get a 120gb nvme that’ll likely never fail in my lifetime of Pi usage, or carry two mirrored SD cards for the inevitable failure that’ll happen when I can’t re-image a machine (like in flight - https://stratux.me https://stratux.me)
- ldiracdelta 6y agoThis spring, I deployed 20 PI's at work for a project and they are used every day, many many times a day. I've had 2 corrupt SD card failures so far. It's hard to know for certain what the cause is. We have spare SD cards to swap in for this application. For my application, having a spare SD image isn't a problem and I don't need five 9's of uptime, but the SD cards seem to be a point of fragility. Ultimately we're very happy with the system, but the SD cards are a point of failure that just need to be mitigated.
- kingosticks 6y agoIs your use-case not perfect for the network boot feature?
- ldiracdelta 6y agoMany are remote and rural. Internet and network is frequently iffy. Has to work completely offline for hours at a time as needed, including after a power cycle.
- zemo 6y agoyou're right, they want to not debug anything at all, they want to have a drawer full of microSD cards with the OS pre-installed. When a kid says "I have a problem" you say "ok here's a fresh install" and swap the SD card.
- geerlingguy 6y agoAlso, the CM4 does work with native NVMe or SATA storage (at the expense of USB 3.0 ports).
- bonzini 6y agoThe RPi4 SoC already has PCIe support; it's used for the USB controller, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a version that has an M.2 PCIe slot. It could be used for NVMe, WWAN or faster Ethernet. USB could remain available through USB OTG and it would sit in the middle between the RPi4 and the Compute Module 4. Using the USB power socket for OTG is doable already on the Pi4, but to do it in a fully supported way would need some extra components to properly handle USB-C configuration. Still cheaper than an H2plus
- sbisson 6y agoIt's enabled in the Pi 4 compute module; the carrier board has a PCIe slot.
- JustFinishedBSG 6y agoOr you know there's this thing called eMMC that's mostly pin compatible with SD cards and yet provide fast, resilient and cheap storage.
- varispeed 6y agoI had devices with eMMC and can't remember any of them being "fast" and "reliable".
- hajile 6y agoFast and reliable can be relative, but most SBC systems with emmc get 2-3x the IO performance of an SD card.
- numpad0 6y agoI believe the reason they are “eMMC” than “eSD” is because they can’t be certified for SD specs. MMC and TransFlash at this point is a synonym for SD Card when someone cannot refer to them for license/certification reasons.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> There are alternatives to RPi The alternatives to RPi don't have nearly as rich selection of polished software, vibrant community and ecosystem as Raspberry Pi has. The best parts (besides hacker-orientedness) of RPi are its uniformness and popularity.
- qwertox 6y agoIf would make sense to be able to attach a $25 32GB SSD to the bottom of a RPI. Then add some kind of a U-shaped connector to connect the RPI to the SSD and a place for the screws, so that they are fixed back to back.
- paleogizmo 6y agoI was going to say the same thing. The RPi was introduced at a time when cheap SATA SSDs weren't a thing, nor were beefy ARM CPUs. It's starting to feel like an Edward Scissorhands situation.
- justin66 6y agoIf only there were some kind of bus that were universally available so we wouldn't need such an awful, hacky solution. Something capable of transferring all that data serially.
- pizza234 6y agoeMMC storage are comparatively very fast, and I believe they have a comparatively little or negligible impact on the end price (competitors like Hardkernel put it in the directly competing products).
- ejolto 6y agoThe RPI compute modules already use eMMC flash. RPi Compute Module 1 was released in 2014 and uses eMMc flash.
- jonp888 6y agoThis is misleading. You have removed the first part of that sentence "Early on, the Raspberry Pi project leaned towards..." Whilst education is still important, particularly on the charity side, these days the RPi Trading division explicitly targets multiple markets, for instance, the compute boards specifically targeted at industrial usage. This product is described in their own press release as targeting the christmas toy market amongst others.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoWhat percentage of raspberry pis do you think actually go to that "target audience"? 20%?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 6y agoThere are countless Android phones with eMMC without much problems
- ajsnigrutin 6y agoAndroid phones are useles... no ethernet, no gpio, shitty cooling, hard to get an OS installed, hard to debug, and compared to RPI4, too expensive. RPi4 is great... small cheap, basically a full pc in a small box, with low power usage, low heat production, no noise, and yes... with a shitty storage solution.
- gtf21 6y agoI think the parent comment was just pointing out that the storage solution should work fine, given how many android devices use it.
- kingosticks 6y agoSome Android phones use (or used to use?) flash-friendly file system formats like F2FS, JFFS2, YAFFS2. I'm not sure if that's still a thing but it would be interesting to know the pros and cons of using one of those instead. Interesting I did find they are/were considering F2FS for the RPi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=273490&sid=42e60b4d39e91e7ca677c2e35ebd8861 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=2734...
- Rebelgecko 6y agoEven with the cost of a $5 ethernet adapter, you can get Android phones significantly cheaper than a Raspberry Pi. GPIO is a bit trickier, since most devices don't break it out, but for some purposes the audio jack is usable. There's also USB-GPIO adapters but they can be a bit pricey (although if you're interfacing with something like an ESP32 BLE works really well)
- ornornor 6y agoFWIW I’ve used a rpi1 then 2 then 3 as my Kodi/openelec/libreelec box for years each and it’s been running very smoothly. Maybe not the most demanding in terms of storage writes but still, I’m very satisfied with it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pbronez 6y agoNVMe hats are available for less than $50 Geekworm Raspberry Pi 4 X872 M.2 NVMe SSD Expansion Board Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B only, Support X735/X710/X765/X725 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0855T2KFW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0855T2KFW
- hda111 6y ago2021 Compute Module 4 will have NVMe storage.
- filleokus 6y agoFWIW: Now you can get raw PCI-E access with the Compute Module [0] + IO Board [1], allowing you to put a SSD on there over a robust interface. But yeah, I would also love this to be built in on something like the RPI. Closest option according to my research is probably the Rock Pi, but then it's not really straight forward to boot from it etc... [0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/ [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-board https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...
- throwaway894345 6y agoI know relatively little about the Compute Modules... Are there any decent "racks" for these that would allow you to assemble many of them into a single unit?
- MayeulC 6y agoWell, at least Pine64 makes one. I have no idea if those are pin-compatible with Pi compute module, though. https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/ https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/ It's a bit sad the Pi foundation dropped the DDR form factor, though, it was a good idea IMO. For this, they could have gone with an EOMA68 form-factor, that would have been awesome: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
- smokelegend 6y agoHave you tried using berryboot? Gives you an option to install os on external storage. You can set it up to dual boot multiple distros if you wanted. I agree pi4 would benefit from better storage options, but for the money it's still a impressive package.
- MisterTea 6y agoPi 4 compute module breaks out the pcie port which is use for usb 3.0 on the pi 4. This means someone could make a motherboard with an m.2 M-key socket. The pcie port could also be routed to a switch to be split among multiple pcie devices such as usb 3.0, ethernet and so on.
- rwmj 6y agoThe RPi 4 has USB 3 + UAS which is actually quite decent. I use it for Aarch64 development[1]. It boots and runs entirely off the SSD, and the performance is not spectacular but perfectly usable, and being it's a regular SSD it should be at least as reliable as a laptop. It also has a firmware bug where it cannot boot unless there is an (empty, unused) SD card in the slot, which is annoying! [1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running-fedora-32/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running...
- larschdk 6y agoI boot my RPi 4 entirely from USB with the Sep-3-2020 bootloader. No sd-card inserted. The Sandisk Extreme Pro benchmarks at 230 MB/s on USB 3.0.
- kaszanka 6y agoSeems like this only affects UEFI bootloaders.
- justin66 6y agoI've never had the problem either - I started using the RPi4 seriously when it became possible to boot from USB, and it's great. USB boot is working properly in the newest Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu MATE Desktop images as well as the official Raspberry Pi OS. The Samsung T5 and T7 are frighteningly fast USB-attached portable SSDs - some simple tests of mine had them at around 335MB/s. On paper the T7 should be twice as fast, so it's interesting that they tested so close (the T5 was even a little faster, as high as 350MB/s), but they are both totally good enough.
- kingosticks 6y agoSounds like they fixed (read: worked-around) that issue in https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.17 https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.17
- rwmj 6y agoIt's not fixed yet. It's the same as this issue: https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/issues/99 https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/issues/99
- silon42 6y agonormal SATA(2/3) would be plenty good (even better if 2 ports).
- justin66 6y ago> An M2 SATA or NVMe would make this credible but 99% of the problems I've had with the Pi platform is storage related, either being knackered microSD cards, terrible performance or USB power problems. It sounds like literally all your problems would be addressed by using the official power supply and a USB-connected SSD - although your problems might very well be solved just by using the official power supply and a decent SD card. SATA and NVMe interfaces are something some nerds who aren't the target audience for this hardware would like but they don't address the real-world problems you mentioned at all.
- cbm-vic-20 6y agoJeff Geerling (HN:geerlingguy, who is participating in this comments section) has demonstrated using a NVMe drive with the RPi 4 Compute Module and its IO board, which has a PCIe slot. https://youtu.be/HUamq0ey8_M?t=429 https://youtu.be/HUamq0ey8_M?t=429
- throwaway894345 6y agoHah, just came across his blog while trying to debug an issue I'm having: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/fixing-503-service-unavailable-and-endpoints-not-available-traefik-ingress-kubernetes https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/fixing-503-service-un...
- m463 6y agoI think usb-c/usb 3 solved most of the problems. I used to have the low-power indicator show up all the time in the past, but it seems the usb-c power supply has resolved that. Additionally usb boot + usb3 speed has made running completely off of usb instead of sd a good solution. There are also pretty fast yet small form factor drives like the samsung fit to choose from as far as physical size.
- mberning 6y agoYou are looking for in Intel NUC.
- qz2 6y agoYes. I already know what I'm looking for. I posted a picture of it yesterday: https://imgur.com/yjPMYaX https://imgur.com/yjPMYaX (M600, sort of a NUC)
- morio 6y agoI agree 100% with this. I have a fairly large tinker shop with 20-30 different machines and initially bet on the Pi platform to do CNC/Octoprint/robotics/etc controls, thinking I should standardize. Most of the Pis failed with storage issues eventually; be it eMMC, microSD or USB flash drives. Since then I've moved on to x86 based industrial motherboards which ended up costing about the same when you include everything. Zero problems since then. And boot times are now measured in seconds, not minutes.