I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

Post by TaylorAlexander » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 12:02 PM UTC

kochthesecond wrote: post #201

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24

I understand why the Raspberry Pi uses SD cards (cost, simplicity, ease of use) but the entire line would be so much more useful with onboard eMMC storage. SD cards are great for keeping cost down and getting started quickly by flashing OS images from a PC. However, enthusiasts spend so much time fiddling with external storage options and cobbling together messes of powered USB hubs, cables, external enclosures, and…

Yes, I gave up on my rasp pi because of the instability of sd cards. It could barely run a few weeks without manual intervention. Honestly I have no clue how anyone does anything useful with them. Tried using usb attached ssd for a while, but never got it so stable that a remote reboot (or power loss) had acceptable risk.

Post by m-p-3 » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #198

m-p-3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I wish they'd add an m2 slot and scrap the SD card. It really is the bottleneck of the whole system. But they walk a fine balance with PCB space, backward compatibility, performance, cost and user-friendliness.

yes but an sd card can be bought for less than 10 $/€, whereas an nvme disk would cost about the same price of the whole rpi. you have to keep in mind the original goal of the raspberry pi project. if you want nice performance and low power consumption, you're better off considering a cheap intel nuc.

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #182

avmich wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. This makes term "bricked" somewhat theoretical, as in practice almost any state of electronics can be turned back to functioning. In extreme cases you'll have to replace vital parts (if imagination forbids actually fixing broken microchips with a lab equipment), but in many cases it's still possible.

Surely a typical brick contains a significant amount of silicon and sufficient trace amounts of germanium/boron/phosphorus to dope it into useable semiconductors... (That’d make for an awesome YouTube channel project. How I melted down and refined a brick into pure enough elements to make semiconductors and working electronics, in my backyard... I’d totally subscribe to that Patreon.)

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #150

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me the word has a clear sense of permanence built into it. The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. A device is said to be bricked when it is no more useful than a brick. If you drop your smartphone into water, and it shows no signs of life even after a couple of weeks of drying, you've bricked it. The average user is not competent at repair, as that's a spe…

So if Ring fucks up my doorbell's firmware, in a way that I can't fix it... But they have tooling on one test bench somewhere that could load new firmware and bring it back to life... Is it bricked? Is it bricked if they release those tools, but they require specialized repair skills? Is it bricked if they release those tools and it's easy?

Post by bufferoverflow » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #116

m-p-3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I wish they'd add an m2 slot and scrap the SD card. It really is the bottleneck of the whole system. But they walk a fine balance with PCB space, backward compatibility, performance, cost and user-friendliness.

The speed would be much better than an SD card, but nowhere near the peak M.2 performance we've come to love. The SoC they use only has a single lane of PCIe Gen 2. So 500 MB/s peak (MB, not MiB) with large transfers. Throw in a PCIe switch or something so you can still attach a USB 3 controller and now you've doubled the price and power consumption.