11–20 of 112 posts
Testing microSD card speed on a Mac is rather pointless because performance is (severely) limited on the Raspberry Pi through it's terribly slow interface, not necessarily the actual card. Remember RPi 1-3 use a plain SPI interface, and even the new 4 only has UHS-1.
The major problem is not disk write speed, which we can all agree sucks, but longevity and lifespan when used as a system boot disk and also containing /var and similar. The write wear leveling on a u3 microsd card is nowhere near as good as even a $50 consumer class ssd. Small single board computers should move towards m.2 2280 nvme drive support, or at least one sata 6 gbps interface.
Testing microSD card speed on a Mac is rather pointless because performance is (severely) limited on the Raspberry Pi through it's terribly slow interface, not necessarily the actual card. Remember RPi 1-3 use a plain SPI interface, and even the new 4 only has UHS-1.
So the first step is to show how the cards behave in an environment with no artificial performance limitations. This is the baseline "peak performance".
The next step is to show whether the RPi's performance ceiling is below that baseline, or if any specific card behave particularly poorly on the RPi. 2 cards may be equal on a high performing machine but for some reason have big differences when running in the RPi.
The major problem is not disk write speed, which we can all agree sucks, but longevity and lifespan when used as a system boot disk and also containing /var and similar. The write wear leveling on a u3 microsd card is nowhere near as good as even a $50 consumer class ssd. Small single board computers should move towards m.2 2280 nvme drive support, or at least one sata 6 gbps interface.
I always see the argument “but the Pi has the best community support!” trotted out, and I don’t disagree. However, it’s all normally just sane Linux distros on the Pi at the end of the day. Whatever instructions/advice someone has written for a given Pi project will likely be applicable on a non-Pi board anyway.
The major problem is not disk write speed, which we can all agree sucks, but longevity and lifespan when used as a system boot disk and also containing /var and similar. The write wear leveling on a u3 microsd card is nowhere near as good as even a $50 consumer class ssd. Small single board computers should move towards m.2 2280 nvme drive support, or at least one sata 6 gbps interface.
If you need disk performance on the Pi 4, wouldn't it make more sense to only keep the kernel,initrd on the sdcard and mount the primary filesystem off a USB3 device (like an mSATA-2-USB enclosure), that is if you have the space to spare for it in your project/enclosure?
I did something similar with one of the SolidRun devices, but I had to scuttle it due to other hardware problems:
I'm surprised we haven't seen a smaller than M.2 form factor for SATA on embedded devices. It seems like the big limiter on devices like the Raspberry Pi and others are the sd cards/emmc modules, since the amount processing power and ram have been continually going up. If you need disk performance on the Pi 4, wouldn't it make more sense to only keep the kernel,initrd on the sdcard and mount the primary filesystem of…
I'm surprised we haven't seen a smaller than M.2 form factor for SATA on embedded devices. It seems like the big limiter on devices like the Raspberry Pi and others are the sd cards/emmc modules, since the amount processing power and ram have been continually going up. If you need disk performance on the Pi 4, wouldn't it make more sense to only keep the kernel,initrd on the sdcard and mount the primary filesystem of…
https://www.sdcard.org/press/SD_EXPRESS_A_REVOLUTIONARY_INNO...