3 ms·
> Indeed. I think for most of us, seeing the pads there, but unpopulated, was a giant head-scratcher. The Pi 500 would've been more of a slam-dunk win with the
by KennyBlanken 2y ago
> Indeed. I think for most of us, seeing the pads there, but unpopulated, was a giant head-scratcher. The Pi 500 would've been more of a slam-dunk win with the slot in place, even if empty.
Hearing that coming out of a HAM radio enthusiast whose father is a broadcast technician is a little strange.
The most likely explanation is either RF interference; NVMe drives suck down enough power to substantially self-heat during big transfers and I bet that causes all sorts of interesting RF problems, especially given the Pi isn't sold in a case.
Or power sag issues. The Pis have always been infamous for their terrible power supply designs, which seem to be intentional to give resellers a way to bend people over. It's the old "every phone you buy has a different plug and you need $100 in AC and phone adapters" nonsense we used to have to deal with to pad retailer margins.
I remember Motorola designed one of the Nexus phones to require a proprietary fast-charge protocol so that Verizon, who had retail exclusivity for a bit, would get to bend people over for the stupidly expensive charger. Verizon also got Google to permanently fuse the bootloader so installing an alternative OS was impossible. On a nexus phone.
- gruez 2y ago>NVMe drives suck down enough power to substantially self-heat during big transfers and I bet that causes all sorts of interesting RF problem How does heat cause RF issues?
- th0ma5 2y agoPhysical transformation of components and traces maybe?
- johncalvinyoung 2y agoI assumed the OP was eliding that high-frequency circuits and interfaces are notorious for EM/RF noise.
- geerlingguy 2y agoThat's my assumption too, it can't be ruled out, for sure, but a bit of shielding may take care of that.
- MBCook 2y agoThere’s a cost element too. What percentage of buyers would ever use an M.2 slot? How many people would avoid buying it because it lacked the M.2? I suspect the return would never match the parts cost. While there must have been dev time spent designing it, it’s basically free to print on the PCB right? And it’s not like they didn’t have the free space. Interesting RPi thinks it might be useful when reusing the board in future designs. I’d be curious if those ever come.
- wkat4242 2y agoThe regular pi with the official M2 HAT is also unshielded and sold without case. If rf was the problem it would have the same issues. Heat throttling might be an issue but it's still going to be way faster than a microSD.