Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 222 posts

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

#211

Post by bufferoverflow »

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.

SSD: $20 for 128GB on Amazon

SD card: $15.20 for 128GB on Amazon

The price difference is minimal.

But the SSD is much much faster in that price range.

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

#212

Post by Flibble21 »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #211
znpy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SSD: $20 for 128GB on Amazon SD card: $15.20 for 128GB on Amazon The price difference is minimal. But the SSD is much much faster in that price range.

You're missing one of the very important aspects of a RPI is that it's cheap and accessible. Many countries around the world, particularly the poorer ones, don't have Amazon or ready cheap access to SSDs. What they do have access to is phone micro SD cards in adaptors. An 8 or 16GB card is plenty for a computer lab and is affordable and accessible.

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

#213

Post by anderspitman »

ptx wrote: post #197
anderspitman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that still requires an SD card to bootstrap the process...

Yes, once, during setup. But you need to run raspi-config anyway to change the settings, so you need to boot into Raspberry Pi OS somehow even if you're going to be installing something else on the USB drive.

I'm fine running rpi OS, but it would be nice to be able to boot straight into USB without having to do SD first.

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

#214

Post by bufferoverflow »

Flibble21 wrote: post #212
bufferoverflow wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSD: $20 for 128GB on Amazon SD card: $15.20 for 128GB on Amazon The price difference is minimal. But the SSD is much much faster in that price range.

You're missing one of the very important aspects of a RPI is that it's cheap and accessible. Many countries around the world, particularly the poorer ones, don't have Amazon or ready cheap access to SSDs. What they do have access to is phone micro SD cards in adaptors. An 8 or 16GB card is plenty for a computer lab and is affordable and accessible.

Which country doesn't have access to SSDs?

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

#215

Post by rowanG077 »

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…

Why would you want eMMC? I'd rather not have to deal with broken eMMC. And non-upgradeable storage.

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

#216

Post by mlyle »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #208
mlyle wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The existence of tricky edge-cases does not show that the categories are meaningless. Please see my response to avmich's comment.

I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative.

To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknown.

Sitting with the drive powered for an hour without a data connection to let its firmware do internal housekeeping and maybe have the drive come (partially?) back, in an undocumented recovery procedure, is definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum.

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

#217

Post by phkahler »

eggsome wrote: post #174
phkahler wrote: post #87

I challenge anyone to run SolveSpace CAD software on one of these. It should be quite fun.

Being a small and light application I thought the new Occulus Quest would be a great platform for SolveSpace.

Interesting. I assume that would mean interacting with the 3D model in some way. That could be fun - grab a vertex and move it around. It would require some changes to copy the model (and sketch entities) into the VR world since it can't maintain that kind of framerate while the geometry is changing. A voice interface for simple commands like adding dimensions would make it rather like the holodeck.

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

#218

Post by MaxBarraclough »

mlyle wrote: post #216
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of tricky edge-cases does not show that the categories are meaningless. Please see my response to avmich's comment.

I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative. To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknow…

> Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked".

I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful.

You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definitions.

We'd all agree that a severely water-damaged smartphone counts as permanently broken, and as bricked, regardless of whether it would be possible in principle for the device to be repaired at great expense.

> Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked".

I agree that the availability of tooling can impact whether we consider something permanently broken. A failed hard-disk in an old games console might be enough to write off the whole machine, if the machine is hostile to replacement hard-disks and official repair services are no longer available (and their special tooling/software not made public). A failed hard-disk in a desktop computer, though, can easily be replaced.

> definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum

Again, of course there are edge cases. This is true of just about any categorisation we use, outside of mathematics. To refer back to my earlier example, it's not possible to give perfectly precise definitions of chair and table, but this doesn't much matter, the terms are still useful.

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

#219

Post by CameronNemo »

Havoc wrote: post #53

>USB boot is a game changer. A junk drawer 8GB USB stick works just fine As an aside, why isn't there a market for a say 10gig usb medium that isn't flakey AF like microsd etc that die if you squint at it a little too hard USB enclosure and an actually SSD seems like the cheapest option. There has got to be a middle ground here...

Also high endurance SD cards are an option.

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

#220

Post by mlyle »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #218
mlyle wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative. To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknow…

> Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definition…

I think most agree anything not readily fixed by normal, known procedures is "bricked". But most things we call this are not really permanently broken (and we might be surprised to find some of them to be trivially recovered).

I don't really hear "bricked" in use for things damaged mechanically or by water. It's usually in conjunction with a failed upgrade, etc. Almost none of these things are really permanently broken, though some of them for practical purposes may be.

Post reply on HN