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Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

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Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#11

Post by gmiller123456 »

nominated1 wrote: post #6

These sorts of posts come up often and I cringe every time I see dongle attached storage. An unnecessary additional failure point seems counterproductive. I have a Raspberry Pi and I use an SD card because what I’m using it for doesn’t require anything more. If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device and maybe petition the Foundation to add it in a future model. Right tool for the job and…

> I cringe every time I see dongle attached storage

I'm quite curious as to how this is "cringe"worthy. I can certainly see how mechanically stable attached storage is preferable in a lot of situations, but people use Pi's for a vast array of uses, and I cannot imagine that every use case, or even a significant majority of them should be barred from USB attached storage.

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#12

Post by othercharles »

lifty wrote: post #10

Does anyone know any board that is similar to RPi 4, with 8GB of RAM or more and a SATA port or an nvme slot? ARM would be great.

Generally speaking you can choose either power efficiency or a wide bus, but rarely both. If you want a crappy underpowered m.2 slot, probably Intel Atom is the cheapest route.

High performance ARM with m.2 PCI, not sure, but guessing if it's around it probably isn't cheap

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#13

Post by m-p-3 »

lifty wrote: post #10

Does anyone know any board that is similar to RPi 4, with 8GB of RAM or more and a SATA port or an nvme slot? ARM would be great.

Maybe there's something out there, but I don't know of any other SBCs than the Pi4 having more or equal to 8GB.

If you can settle for 4GB, there's tye Rock Pi 4 which has a variant with on-board eMMC or an m.2 slot.

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#14

Post by lifty »

othercharles wrote: post #12
lifty wrote: post #10

Does anyone know any board that is similar to RPi 4, with 8GB of RAM or more and a SATA port or an nvme slot? ARM would be great.

Generally speaking you can choose either power efficiency or a wide bus, but rarely both. If you want a crappy underpowered m.2 slot, probably Intel Atom is the cheapest route. High performance ARM with m.2 PCI, not sure, but guessing if it's around it probably isn't cheap

Yeah, that makes sense. I wouldn't expect the same price point as an RPi and would love a higher performance CPU, but I think they are not out there at the moment. Wouldn't mind having something like 8 graviton2 cores and an nvme slot :)

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#15

Post by FpUser »

nominated1 wrote: post #6

These sorts of posts come up often and I cringe every time I see dongle attached storage. An unnecessary additional failure point seems counterproductive. I have a Raspberry Pi and I use an SD card because what I’m using it for doesn’t require anything more. If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device and maybe petition the Foundation to add it in a future model. Right tool for the job and…

>"...I cringe every time I see dongle attached storage..."

>"...If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device"

Frankly you can cringe all you want but it is really up to the owner to decide how they use their hardware. Your opinion about it is irrelevant as people have their unique situation and are quite capable to weigh all pros and cons of whatever they decide to do.

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#16

Post by rektide »

rwmj wrote: post #4

This is just plugging in NVMe over the USB 3 port? I was expecting this to be soldering something to PCIe lanes coming out of the SoC. Is this going to be any better than using an SSD with UAS which is what I'm doing already? ( https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running... )

I am looking forward to a future where PCIe devices might be connected too. I would really appreciate it if someone other than Intel would kindly please start doing Thunderbolt. Now that USB4 is official, adding PCIe connectivity would be a very good perk for these next generation systems. So far though no one has registered interest. Please can someone other than Intel & Apple prioritize better connectivity? AMD? MediaTek? Qualcomm? Anyone?

There's two modest perks to NVMe over SATA. First, the drives tend to be faster. For large reads/writes, this probably wont help, as you'll be bus limited to USB3 speeds. But for smaller reads & writes, the NVMe drive can maybe probably do more iops, and you may see wins & better latency on workloads. NVMe also has a bunch of under the hood improvements. There's a quite in depth comparison of the two[1]. Larger queues, multiple queues, less round trips to issue commands, better completion model. I am very much unsure of how many of these advantages are exposed & would carry over when the host-to-device connection is still UAS based, which is what adapters like the one in this article still feature, same as if it were SATA. But some of these wins will help latency & iops again vs a SATA drive.

[1] https://sata-io.org/system/files/member-downloads/NVMe%20and...

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#17

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

nominated1 wrote: post #6

These sorts of posts come up often and I cringe every time I see dongle attached storage. An unnecessary additional failure point seems counterproductive. I have a Raspberry Pi and I use an SD card because what I’m using it for doesn’t require anything more. If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device and maybe petition the Foundation to add it in a future model. Right tool for the job and…

I have found that the SD card tends to 'wear out' after a few years. Agreed USB is suboptimal; but it can work OK.

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#18

Post by rektide »

adriancr wrote: post #5

curios what the power draw is and if I need a powered USB hub for this.

Author may have gotten lucky in their Western Digital Blue SN550 selection. It's a fairly low power drive. WD has been making their own controllers, & they have a history of being fairly power friendly. This is a very new drive too. This review[1] shows it using 2.62 watts during a large file copy and on-idling at 0.96 watts.

The best drive shown is a Crucial MX500, using 2.32 watts during cpy and 0.52 watts at on-idle.

There will be some additional power consumption from the usb adapter too but i'd expect no more than 0.2 watts.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-blue-sn550-m2-nvme-s...

Re: Upgrade Raspberry Pi 4 with a NVMe boot drive

#20

Post by throwaway894345 »

othercharles wrote: post #12
lifty wrote: post #10

Does anyone know any board that is similar to RPi 4, with 8GB of RAM or more and a SATA port or an nvme slot? ARM would be great.

Generally speaking you can choose either power efficiency or a wide bus, but rarely both. If you want a crappy underpowered m.2 slot, probably Intel Atom is the cheapest route. High performance ARM with m.2 PCI, not sure, but guessing if it's around it probably isn't cheap

Let's say one has a friend who doesn't know what "a wide bus" refers to... What would be a good way of explaining it to said friend?
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