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Raspberry Pi 5 Gets a MicroSD Express Hat
- zerof1l 1y agoI would avoid using SD cards and go for something else like M.2 or NVMe for storage. SD cards tend to be on the lesser side in terms of performance, failure rate, and silicon quality in general.
- piperswe 1y agoDoes that apply to MicroSD Express?
- privatelypublic 1y agoYes. The,re better, but thermals are killer
- out_of_protocol 1y agoMicroSD Express is basically NVMe, protocol-wise (which is almost directly PCIe), with extra bells like old microSD support, packed into very small package with worse thermals and for extra price. Don't see a reason to use it if you can stick to M.2 NVMe
- JdeBP 1y agoWhilst the headlined article is interesting, it's a case of the new and shiny distracting from regressions in what already exists. The Raspberry Pi 5 is lacking in some fairly basic support that the Pi 4 has. There's no TianoCore, no NetBSD, no FreeBSD, no OpenBSD, no OmniOS(CE) … in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS. A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with. * https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/RaspberryPi https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat... * https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/#index6h2 https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/#index6h2 * https://www.freebsd.org/where/#download https://www.freebsd.org/where/#download * https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html * https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/ https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/ So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.
- jamesy0ung 1y agoRaspbian works perfectly fine. Most of those other operating systems don’t really have the best GPIO support which is where Raspberry Pi shines. I’d just get a cheap mini pc if I wanted to run something else.
- franga2000 1y agoExcept the RPi is smaller, lighter, lower power and more efficient than most mini PCs. It also has a bunch of unique addon boards, many (most?) of which don't really use GPIOs, but a standard communication interface like PCIe/USB/serial/SPI/I2C. No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.
- avgeek23 1y agoAn arduino board with a esp32 added to it can do a lot of things(minus some cam/image recognition stuff) for half the price. Rpi is strictly suited to very specific use cases.
- franga2000 1y agoI've deployed my fair share of both and SBCs are still a very widely useful middle ground. Being able to use existing Linux tools instead of limited or nonexistent embedded libraries is a huge benefit. Most things to do with sound or video, for example, are totally infeasible with microcontrollers. A mini PC is noticably bigger and you need to add a microcontroller over USB if you need absolutely any real world interaction (even something as simple as sensing ambient light to adjust brightness). My new favourite tool for these situations is the Radxa X4, which is the exact dimensions of a RPi, but with an Intel x86 CPU and an onboard microcontroller to drive GPIOs.
- avgeek23 1y agoYeah rpi does have some real world usage but for many small projects that hobbyists do rpi can be a overkill. Will checkout the radxa x4 sounds interesting.
- Veliladon 1y agoSadly you can't really buy the cards for love or money right now.
- musicale 1y agoShould any enterprising vendor other than Lexar/Longsys figure out how to deliver 1TB MicroSD Express cards, a million rabid switch 2 owners are waiting to pounce...
- Havoc 1y agoBit of a “why does this exist” product to me. If you’re going to use pcie lanes anyway then stick a m.2 at the end of it to benefit from mass scale of nvme drive production. I also have a general distrust of sd cards and their write levelling. Maybe just rotten luck or fake ones but they never seem to last
- myself248 1y agoI don't think anyone's using this for bulk storage in a serious way, but it's a great way to get started tinkering with the media and the interface. The microcontroller on the hat is there to issue some SD-interface commands to light up the PCIe interface, and that's a combination sure to expose some interesting behaviors.
- txcwpalpha 1y agoThe article covers this: > Sadly, having a microSD Express card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 does not make a lot of sense at this point due to the cost of MicroSD Express card. An M.2 NVMe SSD is cheaper... For those reasons, [we] will not manufacture the HAT, but the design is released under a permissive MIT license, so anybody could manufacture it if needed. Maybe a microSD Express slot will make sense in a future Raspberry Pi 6, as prices come down.
- schappim 1y agoAs someone who runs a business that sells thousands of Raspberry Pis, the idea of encouraging more users to store data on microSD cards is quite concerning to me. The introduction of the m.2 HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 has been a game changer, not just in terms of speed, but also in significantly improving disk/filesystem reliability. I guess all I'm saying is, for the love of God, if you've got a choice and need to store data on a Pi5, please use the m.2 HAT + SSD from Raspberry Pi. Unlike other fruit companies, the prices for the SSDs are quite reasonable.
- shadowpho 1y agoIf you’ve got a choice get something else lol. The m2 hat blocks the cpu heatsink, and doesn’t fit into most cases. It blows my mind why was m2 not just built in already… You can get an n100 mini pc for $100 with more ram and like 5x perf for same price
- elcritch 1y agoEven plain USB thumb drives are far more stable than SD cards. I suspect more room for capacitors that enable finishing writes on power out. I’ve had Samsung SlimFit USB drives with BTRFS last for years on rpi3s and rpi4s.
- qwertox 1y agoIf MicroSD Express adds direct PCIe support in that tiny, uncooled form factor, it would be nice to see some actual benchmarks with that Hat due to throttling.
- thekevan 1y agoI lost interest in getting Pi when I realized a mini PC is about the same price and will have specs that are about the same or a little better.
- RachelF 1y agoMini-PCs are quite a bit better dollar for dollar. Pi's were great when they were cheap, but now the Raspberry Pi has IPO'd those days are over.
- codeflo 1y agoRaspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.
- znpy 1y ago> But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Feelings over facts, at least you acknowledge it. The success of (and the issues with) the raspberry pi mainly derive from it being mistaken for a good home-server platform. It's not, it's awful for that use case. For pretending it to be an embedded systems platform (either for prototyping or to later target the compute modules for production usage) sure, it's great. It's all fine as long as the (computing) needs are low and budget is not an issue.
- gambiting 1y ago>> It's not, it's awful for that use case. The problem, imho, is that it's amazing right up to a point where it isn't. It's tiny, noiseless, sips power....while providing what you need it to. Until one day the service you set up is not available anymore, the Pi isn't responding on the network, and then you check and the microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone. Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.
- mschuster91 1y ago> Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch. You can get that from any homelab setup though. Personally, I long since went the route of regularly setting up my Pis from scratch using Ansible - that way I at least know that I didn't forget to commit any manual changes made. Pi-specific, my recommendation is to have a serious power supply. For the old Pis with Micro USB, Meanwell makes good ones, link that with a good wire gauge (18 AWG or more) and off you go. New Pis with USB-C, Anker power supply and a decent USB-C cable... that solves a lot of microSD corruption issues because the power regulation to the card isn't that good and just passes through brownouts/undervoltage conditions. And the second recommendation, use "industrial" microSD cards, preferably those that are SLC. Grab them from Mouser, yes they are a bit more expensive than "normal" microSD cards but will live so much longer. [1] https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDQED-008G-XI https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDQED-008G-XI
- _giorgio_ 1y agoImagine you’d like to experiment with a remotely accessible webcam - for instance, streaming over RTSP - without necessarily running YOLO or other detection models on the device itself. Which board-and-camera combination would you choose?
- nottorp 1y agoThe Raspberry Pi 5 should have a m.2 slot by default. Even if it's one of those short ones to maintain form factor.