I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that you shouldn't use microSD for / on your SBC! I've been running a m.2 drive on a Pi5 for a few months now (using the P

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that you shouldn't use microSD for / on your SBC! I've been running a m.2 drive on a Pi5 for a few months now (using the Pimoroni HAT), and it's a game changer for how well it performs at just about any task that uses disk I/O at all - even just opening applications, and it massively helps reliability. You might not get amazing headline sequential I/O speeds because it's only a PCIe 2.0 x1 connection (you can run it at 3.0, but it's unsupported), but the difference in random I/O is huge. It makes whole classes of usecases practical as a result - you can now use a Pi5 for databases, CI, etc - especially paired with the fact that the Pi5 is another decent step in CPU performance. My Pi5 is now running a GitLab CI arm64 runner building Docker containers using a Samsung 980 Pro as the SSD... and it just works. It's a bit slower than building the x86_64 version on a modern Xeon, but not excessively so - a docker container build that is mostly installing .deb packages with one compilation step that takes about 90s on 4 cores/8 threads of Intel Xeon Silver 4410T with also a Samsung 980 Pro for storage takes about 120s on the Pi5. For the one-off price of a Pi5 + NVMe HAT compared to say something like an Apple Mac Mini or the ongoing cost of cloud arm64 rental, I think that's very reasonable! edit: I still think microSD has it's place - but it should be as removable/transient storage - not as storage for your root fs.