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Balena Etcher Pro – Fast write to multiple cards or USB disks at once
- cf100clunk 5y agoI, myself, can be an annoying pedant, so I'll just tl;dr that the grand total of 160 SD cards and/or USB drives is achieved by daisy chaining these units, provided that all 160 images to be written are from one single source image.
- MarcScott 5y agoAnd at nearly $1000 a unit, that will set you back around $10,000.
- cf100clunk 5y agoDefinitely not a consumer-level cost as the desired count of target devices climbs.
- mmastrac 5y agoI have zero need to ever write that many USB sticks at once, but man does this trigger my inner "I want that" feeling. Question: how do I justify it to myself? (kidding)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cf100clunk 5y agoProvisioning lots of Raspberry Pis would be a use case, so definitely less and less a consumer-level device as the scale of output climbs. Such is the entire field of computing hardware.
- legrande 5y agoIt might useful for brands who want to distribute 'swag' with USB flash drives with their logo on it, and some software flashed to it, to promote their product.
- bradleyy 5y agoI do love the idea of these, but at that price ($990) I'm afraid our church will stick with 16-port USB hubs and my horrible, cobbled python script to rsync a folder to them. Looking at the price, it's probably justified, but hard to switch when I have a working solution that was $23 + a couple hours of coding.
- ampdepolymerase 5y agoDoes your time not have value? The monthly tithes should more than pay for it.
- bradleyy 5y agoYes, but the work's already been done for years. Again, I think this device isn't a terrible value, but a $2-300 device would be a lot sweeter proposition for my demographic.
- selfhoster11 5y agoDepends on how much value said time has, and how much of it one is willing to donate. I, for one, wouldn't mind burning two dozen USBs/SDs each Sunday with some cobbled-together hardware and software. I'm pretty sure that 12-port or more powered USB hubs can be gotten quite cheaply.
- cf100clunk 5y agoDefinitely a question of the requirements justifying the scale and cost of output.
- tinus_hn 5y agoBalena Etcher can also create bootable drives which is a lot harder than just rsyncing files to them.
- sly010 5y agoOr easier depending on what exactly you are doing. Rsync has a lot of switches, 'dd' has 'if' and 'of' :)
- fuzzylightbulb 5y ago$50.00 USD (deposit) balena EtcherPro full price will be $990 + VAT (if applicable) and shipping. Your pre-order deposit here will be deducted from the final price. neat tool if this is actually a need. the expansion/cable management looks pretty slick. on a related front, I do sometimes wish that I could burn a lot of CDs all at once, but not often enough that I am going to buy a $1000 piece of dedicated hardware. One at a time with ImgBurn it is!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gtirloni 5y agoYeah, the daisy chain mechanism is quite interesting.
- legrande 5y ago> I do sometimes wish that I could burn a lot of CDs all at once That used to be the case when CD-based piracy was rampant and you had groups with literally 1000s of CD-writing burners to mass produce pirated copies of movies/software/music etc Now the use-case for this Balena device would mainly cater to brands wishing to promote their product with a custom USB flash drive logo and some software/promotional material found on the drive
- selfhoster11 5y agoI'd expect this to be also used for installation media, and for Raspberry Pi deployments in education.
- 34679 5y agoBalena Etcher is spyware. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2977 https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2977
- cucumb3rrelish 5y agoYou should add for context that the two things it collected in the past were IP adress and a timestamp
- cf100clunk 5y agoBoth of which fall squarely into the sort of analytics that fit the Wikipedia definition of spyware. Why, Balena?
- ctoth 5y agoSo all the default configured access.log files for all the Apache and Nginx servers out there are spyware? I'm kinda confused by this point because any time your computer makes a TCP connection to another host, that host knows what time it is, and knows what your IP address is.
- SahAssar 5y agoI think the point is that for an application writing a local file to a local disk that should not be required to run. Even just prompting or asking would be fine.
- mmda-2 5y agoActually, Wikipedia's definition of spyware makes a point in the intro that this behavior may be present in malware as well as in legitimate software and concludes that because these behaviors are so common, and can have non-harmful uses, providing a precise definition of spyware is a difficult task.
- 34679 5y agoYou make it sound as though they aren't still collecting data and the only things they've ever collected are IP addresses and timestamps. That's not accurate context.
- theothermatt 5y agoForgive my ignorance but what are the use cases for a device such as this? Are there specific industries or organizations that this is aimed at? Is it something that would be used by consumers/hobbyists for particular projects? Any insight is appreciated!
- seibelj 5y agoI own a company that makes specialized hardware using raspberry pis (https://icryptonode.com/ https://icryptonode.com/). This is very helpful.
- theothermatt 5y agoThat makes sense and I should have thought of it with all of the packages I've ordered from Canakit
- kemiller2002 5y agoKind of old school, but if you were going to give out usb drives at a trade show with a demo/app/video of some sort on it. A lot of rural America doesn't have fast broadband, so this would make it easy to distribute something without worrying about the internet.
- caymanjim 5y agoHandouts at conventions or other events; provisioning large deployments in a corporate environment; vendors shipping media to customers who need it in physical form (computers don't come with optical drives anymore, and sometimes you can't download); small/medium-scale manufacture of embedded/IoT devices. Just envisioning some uses off the top of my head.
- chaos_emergent 5y agoI've wanted the Etcher Pro to come out because I used to manage dozens of IoT devices, it took the better part of two days to flash operating systems onto them before I could deploy them into the field. The Pro would've made that process take minutes instead of days!
- numpad0 5y agoTIL £1000 for 16-port media duplicator is cheap. Competitors seems to be charging three times or even more. $3499 for a 16x2 LCD and a glorified USB hub!? $7800!?
- tinus_hn 5y agoWelcome to the world of Enterprise!
- 2III7 5y agoThe DIY version of this is a bunch of USB hubs combined with a set of these readers https://www.kingston.com/en/memory-card-readers/mobilelite-plus-microsd-reader https://www.kingston.com/en/memory-card-readers/mobilelite-p... And writing the cards can be done with Balena Etcher https://www.balena.io/etcher/ https://www.balena.io/etcher/ Works well enough and much cheaper than the Pro version. Using it regularly to provision Raspverry Pi-s.
- konmouz 5y agoThis setup can work well. EtcherPro is using the standard Etcher app too. The performance and the UX won't be the same, but as you said it will be much cheaper.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- olivierestsage 5y agoI used to use Balena Etcher for writing bootable media, but have started to use Ventoy[1] for this instead. It's really nice to be able to have multiple bootable ISOs on a single flash drive (and also keep using them for regular storage at the same time). [1] https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
- cf100clunk 5y agoI just took a quick look at Ventoy's documentation and I've missed whether Ventoy can simultaneously write the same image on up to 160 devices.
- selfhoster11 5y agoBalena Etcher (the same software that runs on the Balena Etcher Pro) is an Electron app that can be used on standard computers. If you use Etcher as a way of switching the same installation drive to install a different OS by re-burning the install image, then Ventoy totally makes sense.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoThis looks like a professional grade tool for their target market at a reasonable price point. If you’re trying to write 100s or 1000s of cards per day the amortized cost of this becomes negligible very quickly. For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market. If you have a scaled manufacturing or even prototyping facility, having an engineer spend a couple days cobbling together scripts and instructions to do the same thing as well as maintaining it on the floor will cost more than this device. On the other hand, if your a hobbyist with plenty of time but limited budget then this isn’t for you.
- deeviant 5y ago> For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market. Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process. This seems to fall in the niche between somebody that just happens to flash a lot of images and businesses at scale that do 1000s and it seems like it's a bit of a perilous position.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process In practice, lead times are long enough and release cycles short enough that it can make sense to have these devices at point of manufacture so you can ship with the latest software image. Imagine you order 10,000 pre-flashed SD cards for your project but half way through the production run you decide you need to change the software. Do you discard thousands of SD cards and re-order a new batch? Or do you buy a couple of these and simply add it as another station on the assembly line so you can get back to production right away?
- adolph 5y agoIf you are ordering 10k + pre-flashed SD cards then you are an enterprise. On first run the user must download an installer to download the most recent bugs and features. That is how things are done.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sly010 5y agoI never understood the market for Balena Etcher. You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/rdisk3` (or whatever your disk id is). I have done it dozens of times. It doesn't give you a progress indicator, but I don't need to do this often anyway. The pro version does make sense thought, I just can't imagine a long running manufacturing process where the SDcards are arriving faster than I can write to them.
- automato 5y agofrom what i can tell, the pro version is fairly hackable - you can literally write software that will sense what's plugged into it and do something with that. for example, you can plug an oscilloscope into port 1, a DMM into port 2, a 3d printer into port 3, power your circuit from port 4, and you have a "brain" that controls your entire setup as well as reads inputs from your measuring equipment, might be far-fetched, i'm just spitballing ideas here
- cf100clunk 5y agoShowing progress of dd writes using status=progress flag and/or pv command: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-progress-while-coping/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-pro...
- DenseComet 5y agoI once nuked my OS partition flashing a USB drive using dd. Completely my mistake, but now I just stick to using etcher. Takes three clicks, doesn't require me to remember how to use dd, and prevents any stupid mistakes.
- Barrin92 5y agoi once messed up the disk ID and fucked my system by accidentally confusing the usb drive with a disk and since then I've just used etcher or other gui tools, simpler and safer. also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.
- dijit 5y agoInterestingly I saw someone not even a day ago on HN asking for _exactly_ this kind of product, complaining that everything that looked even remotely close was some whitelabelled endlessly rebadged junk[0]. Weird to see people taking the exact opposite stance and asking "who is it for". Obviously this is _awesome_ for any large deployment of Pi's. Imagine you'rea teacher and you're giving Pi's to kids (their intended use case), I wouldn't want to write 30 cards one by one. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28141304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28141304
- jmst 5y agoGotta love the new and improved Hacker News where ads make it to the front page daily.
- Decabytes 5y agoI've always used dd to make bootable usb sticks, but stared using Balena etcher to make the bootable sd cards for my raspberry pis and it's so darn easy. I can do it on the command line, but etcher detects the correct media to flash every time i've used it, and when I'm doing multiple sticks it just makes it easy. This looks awesome if I were to be making large rpi clusters
- Lammy 5y agoIt’s pretty slick software, but I stopped using it once I realized how much it was spying on me: https://www.balena.io/privacy-policy/ https://www.balena.io/privacy-policy/ https://forums.balena.io/t/serious-privacy-concerns-with-etcher-1-4-4/4103 https://forums.balena.io/t/serious-privacy-concerns-with-etc... (2018, also referencing a now-fixed software bug, but still an interesting look at what types of requests it makes by default)
- automato 5y agothat's a bit ironic considering where you're posting this https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
- Lammy 5y agoI’m talking about the analytics/surveillance inside the software, not just their logs of me browsing to this page. The privacy policy page kinda bundles them all together when explaining it. There’s an in-app toggle to (supposedly) disable it, and that’s fine for people like me who are in the habit of checking the settings when I try new software, but that means I can never recommend Etcher to a friend since I know 99% of them won’t bother doing that.
- automato 5y agoAnd this isn't analytics/surveillance? - "We collect information about how you use our Service, such as the types of content that you view or engage with, the features you use, the actions you take, and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities" - "Includes name of the device, operating system, and browser you are using" - "Internet Protocol address, browser type and settings, the date and time of your request, and how you interacted with the Site"
- Animats 5y agoAutomatic Updates - Your device will automatically improve over time, as we'll keep adding new features. Why did they have to backdoor the thing? Now you don't know if it's scanning your content or extracting crypto keys and sending them to master control. It's a copier. You had one job.
- automato 5y agoeven if they try scanning your stuff, if you don't connect it to the internet, it can't do anything other than its "one job".
- konmouz 5y agoAlso true
- konmouz 5y agoThat's not our intention actually. Etcher, the open source app that EtcherPro is using, keeps evolving all the time, so we wanted EtcherPro to be able to keep up. Nevertheless, EtcherPro is hackable by design, so if you have concerns you can write your own software with any level of protection you want. - EP lead designer
- Animats 5y agoIntent does not matter. If it has WiFi and remote access, people will try to break in, and probably succeed. Build a backdoor, and it will be used.
- crtasm 5y agoI tried Etcher on linux 2-3 years ago. I would love if it had _asked permission_ before making requests back to your servers. Perhaps this is now the case.
- AlexandrB 5y agoIs Etcher still an electron app? Love to run an instance of Chrome so I can have a GUI for "dd".
- konmouz 5y agoYes, it's currently an electron app
- automato 5y agoi don't think it's a GUI for "dd", at least it works way faster than "dd" for all the cards I've tried.
- KMnO4 5y agoYou’re most likely using dd wrong then. Perhaps an incorrect block size or not writing to the raw device (e.g on Mac, that would be /dev/rdisk1). That said, the fact that Etcher doesn’t require you to know this is a plus.
- selfhoster11 5y agoI'm not a fan of Electron, but Etcher is one of the few exceptions where I'm happy to do that. It's just that convenient.
- j1elo 5y agoActually, think of it. If we have to accept Electron apps existing at all, Etcher is precisely the best possible kind of such app. One that you open, make it do its job, and close it. Meanwhile being an HTML UI it allows the creator to focus on the best operation possible and not lose time on UI shenanigans. For comparison, the worst kind of Electron app in my opinion would be one that you have to keep open at all times, losing all the resources that Electron eats, on a "permanent" way.
- jimmyswimmy 5y agoI had to burn 1500 usd cards a few years ago for a project. Bought a 10 port USB splitter and 10 USB-uSD card converters. Wrote a simple script that mounted, dd'd, verified, and umounted whatever was in there. This thing is bound to be much faster, but really - the cost is in the labor. My biggest cost savings was in buying the cards on pallets, rather than having to shuck them from packaging individually. The time to stick all the cards in the slots, and pull them out afterwards, dominated all costs associated with duplication. If I had to do it again, and IF I could have frozen the image in time, I'd have just paid a duplication company to burn them. The cost for that was smaller than the cost of the cards.
- drekipus 5y agoHonestly, I worked at an electronics retailer and I had to burn 200 copies of the same disk image, twice a year, for the RPI. I can't remember if I used gnome multi disk writer or Balena etcher, but the "10x card readers on a 10 port hub" did the trick, and was relatively painless. there's no way my company was going to pay for this. Performance was limited by the SD card rather than the equipment. Does each unit in the Daisy chain have a screen? Can you buy secondary units that don't have a screen? Seems to waste screens after the first one. Also I'm really tired of growing acceptance of e-waste. "Burn 1000s of USBs at trade shows and throw them around" - QR codes are technology. Just print out a QR code that goes to an interactive website.
- rasz 5y agoScreens are maybe ~$20 in BOM. You arent paying for hardware (its 4x pi, probably $200 total bom excluding enclosure due to molds cost), you are paying for design, polish and someone actually standing behind product and actively supporting it.
- konmouz 5y agoHappy to see this thread on HN so I'll add a bit of context since many people have questions about the purpose and use cases of EtcherPro. - Software is the core focus of our company balena (https://www.balena.io/ https://www.balena.io/). Formerly known as resin.io, we developed balenaCloud, a platform to build and manage fleets of IoT devices -- essentially removing friction when dealing with remote fleets (over-the-air updates, multicontainer application, etc). As balenaCloud gained traction, one onboarding hurdle kept cropping up: people were struggling to flash OS images onto their chosen hardware platform. Say you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi. You'd first need to use your terminal or some clunky software to download the desired OS image and flash it onto a micro SD card. Every OS had different software, forcing us to keep refining instructions, and none of the tools validated whether the write was done correctly. Next, you'd have to plug the SD card back into the Raspberry Pi and boot the system. It might sound simple but the process was so tedious, slow and error-prone that it discouraged a good number of our potential users. Frustration Necessity is the mother of invention and so we took the bull by the horns and made our own (open source) image writing application, Etcher, focused on user experience and speed. What we didn't know was that the problem extended far beyond our use case. As a result, Etcher now has a large community of users, supporters and advocates as it flashes about two million images per month. - We now had a slick image writer, but what happens when you scale your fleet? Etcher can flash multiple cards simultaneously, but the process still requires a custom USB hub with SD card adapters, which severely impacts your flashing speed. As for the available industrial solutions, the consistent feedback from our users is that these are expensive, slow and clunky -- everything Etcher is not. Further, none of these legacy duplicators support Etcher's ability to flash devices without an SD card. The writing was on the wall: it became clear to us that if we wanted to help our customers scale their IoT fleets, we needed to build a hardware version of Etcher for professionals -- EtcherPro. - If this wall of text wasn’t enough, you can read the full blog post: https://www.balena.io/blog/taming-the-hard-in-hardware-in-8-steps/ https://www.balena.io/blog/taming-the-hard-in-hardware-in-8-... or, you can watch an in-depth video presentation: https://youtu.be/pld8RSXu7ms?t=1178 https://youtu.be/pld8RSXu7ms?t=1178