Raspberry Pi Launches Its Own Branded SD Cards and SSDs - Plus SSD Kits (omgubuntu.co.uk) 24
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu:
Having recently announced is own range of Raspberry Pi-branded SD cards (with support for command queuing on the Pi 5 and reliable read/write speeds) the company is now offering its own range of branded Raspberry Pi SSDs... And for those who don't have an M.2 expansion board? Well, that's where the new Raspberry Pi SSD Kit comes in. It bundles the official M.2 HAT+ with an SSD for an all-in-one, ready-to-roll solution.
Eben Upton expects it to be a popular feature: When we launched Raspberry Pi 5, almost exactly a year ago, I thought the thing people would get most excited about was the three-fold increase in performance over 2019's Raspberry Pi 4. But very quickly it became clear that it was the other new features — the power button (!), and the PCI Express port — that had captured people's imagination. We've seen everything from Ethernet adapters, to AI accelerators, to regular PC graphics cards attached to the PCI Express port... We've also released an AI Kit, which bundles the M.2 HAT+ with an AI inference accelerator from our friends at Hailo. But the most popular use case for the PCI Express port on Raspberry Pi 5 is to attach an NVMe solid-state disk (SSD).
SSDs are fast; faster even than our branded A2-class SD cards. If no-compromises performance is your goal, you'll want to run Raspberry Pi OS from an SSD, and Raspberry Pi SSDs are the perfect choice. The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit... The 256GB SSD and SSD Kit are available to buy today, while the 512GB variants are available to pre-order now for shipping by the end of November.
So, there you have it: a cost-effective way to squeeze even more performance out of your Raspberry Pi 5. Enjoy!
Eben Upton expects it to be a popular feature: When we launched Raspberry Pi 5, almost exactly a year ago, I thought the thing people would get most excited about was the three-fold increase in performance over 2019's Raspberry Pi 4. But very quickly it became clear that it was the other new features — the power button (!), and the PCI Express port — that had captured people's imagination. We've seen everything from Ethernet adapters, to AI accelerators, to regular PC graphics cards attached to the PCI Express port... We've also released an AI Kit, which bundles the M.2 HAT+ with an AI inference accelerator from our friends at Hailo. But the most popular use case for the PCI Express port on Raspberry Pi 5 is to attach an NVMe solid-state disk (SSD).
SSDs are fast; faster even than our branded A2-class SD cards. If no-compromises performance is your goal, you'll want to run Raspberry Pi OS from an SSD, and Raspberry Pi SSDs are the perfect choice. The entry-level 256GB drive is priced at $30 on its own, or $40 as a kit; its 512GB big brother is priced at $45 on its own, or $55 as a kit... The 256GB SSD and SSD Kit are available to buy today, while the 512GB variants are available to pre-order now for shipping by the end of November.
So, there you have it: a cost-effective way to squeeze even more performance out of your Raspberry Pi 5. Enjoy!
And so it begins (Score:2)
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I will miss them but the push for profit will eventually ruin them.
From my view, they abandoned the users for business users around the end of the plague times. So they are well on the way to being not for us.
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Re:And so it begins (Score:4)
You can still buy Pi 3s. And Pi Zeros. You don't have to go with the latest and greatest.
Where Raspberry Pi completely destroys its SBC competitors is in software support and community. There are tons of SBCs out there with very interesting hardware, but totally crap software that is abandoned once the next model of SBC comes out. Raspberry Pi still maintains the latest version of the OS even for its older boards like the Pi Zero or the Pi 3.
Re: And so it begins (Score:1)
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Re: And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't enshittifiation, this is actually useful. A lot of issues people have with Raspberry Pi computers are down to poor quality SD cards, or compatibility issues with certain vendors and firmware.
The company I work for will probably switch to these now, since they are fully tested to be compatible with the Pi computers, and performance looks decent. The extra cost is more than covered by fewer returns, and the fact that there will be support from the vendor for use with this specific hardware. If you tell Sandisk their product doesn't work well with a Pi, they will just blame the Pi and not do anything to resolve it.
The other benefit is that if they sell a lot of them any issues with specific models will quickly become known and well documented. They likely won't change the firmware or flash memory in the cards very often either. As an engineer that makes me happy as it's unlikely I'll have to deal with a batch of cards that mysteriously don't work properly, or die prematurely.
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Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Informative)
I considered switching out my Pi 4 server that runs a bunch of my important services for an x86 machine, but (1) the Pi 4 is good enough and (2) it uses way less power than any x86 machine I could find. Energy consumption is the real strong point of Pi vs x86.
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I started using retired mini desktops. Sometimes I can get them for as little as 'free'. I actually use one as a VM host.
*runs at PCIe 2.0 speed (Score:3)
While this is very cool, I see that Raspberry Pi 5's internal PCIe bussing is Gen 2.0 x1. So although it supports NVMe SSDs from a pure connectivity standpoint and that in and of itself has a lot of value, they will run a lot slower than in your typical modern x86 mobo.
Not being disparaging at all. Raspy Pi 5s are awesome and this is expected, so I looked up this info as I was interested to know the actual throughput one could expect.
Re:*runs at PCIe 2.0 speed (Score:5, Interesting)
PCIe2 is still blazing fast for a storage interlink compared to what was common not that many years ago. There are lots of application where it will be great and more suitably compact than SATA cables, its also 'simpler' than SATA in the m2 format.
That said Pis are getting more 'expensive' and it seems like the trend is more and more to off the shelf parts vs, make something with the GPIO pins. At some point they are going to need to decide how to target these products or maybe create some more stratification, because I don't know what it is anymore. Is it hobby kit, or are they "consumer ARM PC parts"
Re:*runs at PCIe 2.0 speed (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with raspi GPIO is that unless you can and want to use the programmable IO functionality (which is neat, to be fair) you are going to be throwing away a lot of performance using it, and the system is not completely realtime so there's things you can't reasonably do with it. As a result it often makes more sense to just hang a $3 Arduino Nano off of it and use it to do your GPIO, at which point you could have used something else which doesn't have all those pins so you're not paying for them. So they have the same problem of trying to figure out what their product is good for. Most people are either not using the expansion at all, or are using it to add a hat which provides functionality which really ought to be baked into the base product to make it cheaper and smaller — specifically, NVMe.
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The problem is the Pi was originally designed to be produced as cheaply as possible and to be a tool for students. Write a few lines of code to toggle an IO pin or collect data from a sensor. People kept asking for more powerful designs and the Pi foundation obliged. The first Pi had a composite video output and today people use them for playing 4k video at 60hz.
Luckily it opened the door for many clones to appear and RISC-V is getting attention now to free up licensing from ARM.
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Yeah, the second point is the problem.
Yes, by itself it's greater than before and maybe a decent compromise for a device cheaper than alternatives with better options.
However, upon looking a Rpi5 costs about the same as an alternative with PCIe3x4 with m.2 down, and with a significantly beefier processor.
I'd say generally RPi sticking with Broadcom ARM is hurting the value proposition, since Broadcom isn't exactly pushing the envelope with their embedded ARM designs compared to other ARM vendors, and yet as
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Re:*runs at PCIe 2.0 speed (Score:5, Informative)
The Raspberry Pi 5 doc states PCIe 3.0 mode isn't stable, which is why it's not enabled by default:
The Raspberry Pi 5 is not certified for Gen 3.0 speeds, and connections to PCIe devices at these speeds may be unstable.
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The PCIe 2.0x1 interface is one of the reasons why I decided to use a competing device, an Orange Pi 5 Plus. It's significantly more expensive, but also significantly outperforms the RPi 5 with built-in PCIe 3.0x4 M.2 slot, dual 2.5G ethernet, usb-C, up to 32GB RAM, and a significantly faster cpu with more cores.
https://www.amazon.com/Orange-... [amazon.com]
I also have a couple of RP5's around for things that don't require that type of performance.
Best,
But are they any good? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was messing with raspis (before mini pcs got cheap and raspis got more expensive) the SD cards that were shipping when you bought a bundle were poop. For some reason some SD cards have much, much faster random read access than others. You expect them to be varied in terms of write performance, and even in read performance, but I didn't expect them to vary significantly in seek times, the lack of which is supposed to be a key selling point of flash memory. But as it turns out they do vary significantly in this regard. Switching from a Sandisk Ultra card to a Samsung Evo+ literally halved my boot time. We are talking about a period of operation when transfer is sufficiently low that even on a raspi there are no unbuffered writes, as well.
So whose cards are they using? It's not like they manufacture SD cards, so these are about guaranteed to just be someone else's card which has been marked for them without any changes. They say the cards have "support for DDR50 and SDR104 bus speeds" but transfer rate is oddly enough not my biggest concern, nor even is random write performance (which varies as widely as you would expect) but just the random read performance, which is relevant all the time on restricted memory platforms where you don't have enough free memory to hold everything in cache all the time like you can on a desktop these days. A raspi with 8GB RAM is getting into minipc pricing territory where there is seldom a good reason to use one unless you are severely space constrained.
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SSDs, not SD cards. The Raspberry Pi foundation is selling solid state drives (SSDs), not SD cards.
Tell us you read neither TFS nor TFA without telling us [raspberrypi.com]. It's in the title of the discussion you just commented in.
Re:But are they any good? (Score:5, Interesting)
Poor seek performance is because SD cards remap sectors as a matter of course, to level out wear on the flash memory. So every seek involves looking up which area of flash memory that sector was mapped to, and if the lookup isn't optimized by e.g. having it cached in the controller's RAM rather than pulled from flash memory somewhere, it's going to be slow.
Another issue often seen as slow seek performance is where MLC reads need to be repeated due to calibration issues. The voltage in MLC flash fades over time, so the controller has to recalibrate the levels. More basic controllers just read the page, and if it fails checksums they re-read it at a different calibration. So the first read of a sector that has faded a bit takes much longer than subsequent ones, and looks like slow seek performance to the host.
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I get that, but why are there any SD cards which are supposed to be fast which don't buffer that information? It's not like it takes a lot of memory to do it. I get why the very slowest classes of SD card wouldn't bother, because for those cards the price difference is no doubt significant, but I don't understand why anyone would make a card like that in the higher classes. SanDisk, I'm looking at you...
Branded products are nice (Score:3)