6 ms·

With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubu

With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubuntu just fine. If you can get a 8gb memory model it would be perfect. I love it.

mathisfun123 4y ago
You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-with-a-nvme-boot-drive-d9ab4e8aa3c2 https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm browsing some web pages and using a text editor.
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    Hope you never want to do updates or reconfigure any packages or change up any docker containers, etc.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      It doesn't matter. I'm not losing sleep over an apt upgrade taking maybe 10 more seconds. I'd much rather live with that and have a little desktop that barely sips 5 watts of power total.
      - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        10 seconds? Heh. I measured apt upgrades in multiple minutes on the Pi 3B. And forget about doing anything else; the system would hang hard until I/O was cleared. By contrast, upgrading my desktop tower from HDD to SSD was an incredible, dramatic speedup in terms of booting and especially apt upgrades. The latter became nearly instantaneous. Blink and you miss them. Now, on the Pi I use only the heavy-duty brand-name sdcards. I have found that the weak ones tend to suffer badly from ESD. I am not sure how much lower performance is from the heavy-duty cards, but I doubt it is much slower than the fragile ones.
        hammyhavoc 4y ago
        What relevance is the Pi 3B in 2023? This is like invoking a 2016 Android phone against the latest Pixel.
        NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        I don't know; has the sdcard storage interface, the driver, or sdcards themselves, been revolutionised in the past 7 years?
  - mathisfun123 4y ago
    > If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. What you say is true but you didn't respond to someone complaining about ram latencies, you responded to someone lamenting poor disk access perf. And you recommended booting off SSD which is demonstrably specious advice.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      Again I will tell you--it doesn't matter to me and I suspect 99% of users. Unless you are like a Linus tech tips fanatic and eeking out every percent of performance for your Good Gaming Rig then it's fine. Yes the storage performance isn't perfect. It's fine.
      - mathisfun123 4y ago
        Why did you recommend SSD at all if it doesn't make a difference?
        qbasic_forever 4y ago
        Because not all SD cards are the same and I have more large SSD drives sitting around than SD cards. Why do you think results for one SD card map to all of them? Again, it doesn't matter. Real people in the real world aren't performance tweakers. Oh no! Someone on the internet suggested someone do something that isn't optimal to performance! Wow better go on a multi reply freak out about it!
      - hellcow 4y ago
        I couldn’t stream YouTube videos on 1080p without terrible stutters when I tried the Pi4 a few years ago. Has that been fixed?
        Shared404 4y ago
        I believe that there is hardware accelerated video now, though I haven't had hands on a Pi4 to test.
- handwarmers 4y ago
  this is a good point, despite its being downvoted. ty - you saved me a future debug session
- spacetime_cmplx 4y ago
  When it comes to how sluggish a system feels due to its disk, it's much more useful to measure the read latency and throughput of random reads because that's what the system is doing: you read a lot of sectors randomly when you boot or start chromium. https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-usb-vs-sd/ https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-usb-vs-sd/ says their SD card latency was 1.15x the USB disk. Note that the sample size is just 1, so I wouldn't place value on any single benchmark (it could just be that they chose their USB disk and SD card poorly or it was too cloudy that day). This is evident in my URL's hdparm result being wildly different from yours.
bmitc 4y ago
An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi, once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it. It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I have.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  I bought my pi 4 at launch in 2020 before the shortages and scalping, it was $49 IIRC. There is no Intel NUC that's only 50 bucks. And I like that the pi is aarch64 architecture as I am developing for that architecture.
  - hrrsn 4y ago
    You can pick up a Wyse 3040 with an Atom X5 for ~$20. It's limited to 2GB RAM, and of course x86, but the processor benches on par with the Pi 4.
- lexicality 4y ago
  Either you have found an amazing discount for NUCs or you're getting ripped off on your raspi accessories!
  - bmitc 4y ago
    It may depend on one's definition of "not much more". I got my Intel NUC in the barebones configuration since I already had spare 32GB of RAM and an SSD for $387.59. To me, that's not much more than the highest end Raspberry Pi 4 with a case with a heatsink and fan because the NUC: actually works and is usable, has DisplayPort and just generally better I/O aside from the Pi's GPIO, configurable memory, and better CPU and GPU. Plus, you can actually buy one. To me, that's worth it. My Raspberry Pi's are just unusable for anything other than as high-level embedded platforms. I've started selling them off, only keeping one or two for embedded use cases.
- stametseater 4y ago
  I was using a Raspberry Pi v1 as my NAS for years. It was fast enough and got the job done to my satisfaction. However when that pi eventually died and I tried to replace it, I found that v4 Pis were 1) just as expensive as NUCs, and 2) not even available for purchase anywhere that I could find. So now I've got a NUC filling that role. The Raspberry Pi org has really dropped the ball.

mathisfun123 4y ago

You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-with-a-nvme-boot-drive-d9ab4e8aa3c2 https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec

qbasic_forever 4y ago
And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm browsing some web pages and using a text editor.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  Hope you never want to do updates or reconfigure any packages or change up any docker containers, etc.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    It doesn't matter. I'm not losing sleep over an apt upgrade taking maybe 10 more seconds. I'd much rather live with that and have a little desktop that barely sips 5 watts of power total.
    - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
      10 seconds? Heh. I measured apt upgrades in multiple minutes on the Pi 3B. And forget about doing anything else; the system would hang hard until I/O was cleared. By contrast, upgrading my desktop tower from HDD to SSD was an incredible, dramatic speedup in terms of booting and especially apt upgrades. The latter became nearly instantaneous. Blink and you miss them. Now, on the Pi I use only the heavy-duty brand-name sdcards. I have found that the weak ones tend to suffer badly from ESD. I am not sure how much lower performance is from the heavy-duty cards, but I doubt it is much slower than the fragile ones.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        What relevance is the Pi 3B in 2023? This is like invoking a 2016 Android phone against the latest Pixel.
        NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        I don't know; has the sdcard storage interface, the driver, or sdcards themselves, been revolutionised in the past 7 years?
- mathisfun123 4y ago
  > If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. What you say is true but you didn't respond to someone complaining about ram latencies, you responded to someone lamenting poor disk access perf. And you recommended booting off SSD which is demonstrably specious advice.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Again I will tell you--it doesn't matter to me and I suspect 99% of users. Unless you are like a Linus tech tips fanatic and eeking out every percent of performance for your Good Gaming Rig then it's fine. Yes the storage performance isn't perfect. It's fine.
    - mathisfun123 4y ago
      Why did you recommend SSD at all if it doesn't make a difference?
      - qbasic_forever 4y ago
        Because not all SD cards are the same and I have more large SSD drives sitting around than SD cards. Why do you think results for one SD card map to all of them? Again, it doesn't matter. Real people in the real world aren't performance tweakers. Oh no! Someone on the internet suggested someone do something that isn't optimal to performance! Wow better go on a multi reply freak out about it!
    - hellcow 4y ago
      I couldn’t stream YouTube videos on 1080p without terrible stutters when I tried the Pi4 a few years ago. Has that been fixed?
      - Shared404 4y ago
        I believe that there is hardware accelerated video now, though I haven't had hands on a Pi4 to test.
handwarmers 4y ago
this is a good point, despite its being downvoted. ty - you saved me a future debug session
spacetime_cmplx 4y ago
When it comes to how sluggish a system feels due to its disk, it's much more useful to measure the read latency and throughput of random reads because that's what the system is doing: you read a lot of sectors randomly when you boot or start chromium. https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-usb-vs-sd/ https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-usb-vs-sd/ says their SD card latency was 1.15x the USB disk. Note that the sample size is just 1, so I wouldn't place value on any single benchmark (it could just be that they chose their USB disk and SD card poorly or it was too cloudy that day). This is evident in my URL's hdparm result being wildly different from yours.

bmitc 4y ago

An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi, once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it. It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I have.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
I bought my pi 4 at launch in 2020 before the shortages and scalping, it was $49 IIRC. There is no Intel NUC that's only 50 bucks. And I like that the pi is aarch64 architecture as I am developing for that architecture.
- hrrsn 4y ago
  You can pick up a Wyse 3040 with an Atom X5 for ~$20. It's limited to 2GB RAM, and of course x86, but the processor benches on par with the Pi 4.
lexicality 4y ago
Either you have found an amazing discount for NUCs or you're getting ripped off on your raspi accessories!
- bmitc 4y ago
  It may depend on one's definition of "not much more". I got my Intel NUC in the barebones configuration since I already had spare 32GB of RAM and an SSD for $387.59. To me, that's not much more than the highest end Raspberry Pi 4 with a case with a heatsink and fan because the NUC: actually works and is usable, has DisplayPort and just generally better I/O aside from the Pi's GPIO, configurable memory, and better CPU and GPU. Plus, you can actually buy one. To me, that's worth it. My Raspberry Pi's are just unusable for anything other than as high-level embedded platforms. I've started selling them off, only keeping one or two for embedded use cases.
stametseater 4y ago
I was using a Raspberry Pi v1 as my NAS for years. It was fast enough and got the job done to my satisfaction. However when that pi eventually died and I tried to replace it, I found that v4 Pis were 1) just as expensive as NUCs, and 2) not even available for purchase anywhere that I could find. So now I've got a NUC filling that role. The Raspberry Pi org has really dropped the ball.