Whilst the headlined article is interesting, it's a case of the new and shiny distracting from regressions in what already exists.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is lacking in some fairly basic support that the Pi 4 has. There's no TianoCore, no NetBSD, no FreeBSD, no OpenBSD, no OmniOS(CE) … in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS. A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.
So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.
> in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS
How do you figure? E.g. OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Kali, and Zephyr all offer official image support. Others have unofficial support, e.g. I think FreeBSD actually falls in this boat.
A lot of linux native software example redshift still does not work on the rpi. Lot of things are broken. Recently i tried to use it as a basic desktop replacement until my new laptop arrives. Does a terrible f job.
A 10 year old celeron n2930 based mini pc i purchased for 30$ at a scrapper performs way better than the pi4. Ran esxi and bunch of vms on top of it aswell. Sips 10 w of power.
I tend to prefer small x86 boxes myself but the discussion here was supposed regressions on the Pi 5's ability to run anything but the official OS, not general dislikes. Similarly, I think the Redshift thing is actually an X11/Wayland debate.
I’ve noticed most of the replies to your comment address the first half, and none (as of right now) address the second:
> So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.
If by “this” you mean the MicroSD Express hat from the article: this is a hobby project produced by a hobbyist, who seems to have no plans to sell or mass produce it.
It is unfair to the creator for you to lump it in with, and draw a conclusion from, the works produced by Raspberry Pi Holdings.
In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports.
Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).
Yes, it is. And that in turn enables fairly simple installation of NetBSD and suchlike, which have ARM ports that know how to talk to and layer themselves on top of EFI firmware.
An interesting further little feature of TianoCore particularly for Pi 4 users is that it maintains a fake hardware clock. It only ticks forward when the firmware is in boot services mode; it is persisted to the firmware's own image file in the EFI System Partition; and it isn't as effective as even a simple fake-hwclock utility. But it does satisfy the operating systems that assume that there must be a hardware clock, because every computer is PC98-compatible.
Raspbian works perfectly fine. Most of those other operating systems don’t really have the best GPIO support which is where Raspberry Pi shines. I’d just get a cheap mini pc if I wanted to run something else.
Except the RPi is smaller, lighter, lower power and more efficient than most mini PCs. It also has a bunch of unique addon boards, many (most?) of which don't really use GPIOs, but a standard communication interface like PCIe/USB/serial/SPI/I2C.
No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.
I've deployed my fair share of both and SBCs are still a very widely useful middle ground. Being able to use existing Linux tools instead of limited or nonexistent embedded libraries is a huge benefit. Most things to do with sound or video, for example, are totally infeasible with microcontrollers. A mini PC is noticably bigger and you need to add a microcontroller over USB if you need absolutely any real world interaction (even something as simple as sensing ambient light to adjust brightness).
My new favourite tool for these situations is the Radxa X4, which is the exact dimensions of a RPi, but with an Intel x86 CPU and an onboard microcontroller to drive GPIOs.
RPi dropped the ball relative to the competition. Orange Pi boards outperform them for a fraction of the price. There are very few use-cases where Raspberry is preferable.
I just googled Orange Pi, tried to click on the first result, which is their website. But they have no https site set up, so I got no host. Http works but only on iOS safari, that's a bit weird. Is this CN net weirdness?
I think the RPi 4 is still competitive. At ~40$, Orange Pi's boards are Allwinner H618 and Rockchip RK3566 based boards. I do have an Orange Pi 3B in use because it has an nvme port, but the RPi 4 is generally faster.
The Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 are just too expensive. I do have some of the Pi 5s from both these companies, but have replaced them with Intel N100 mini-PCs instead. But I'll still use RPi 4's for my 3d printers and other lower-end uses.
And RPi's software support is just better: I've got an Orange Pi 4. Orange Pi hasn't updated their OS for it in years. Last time I tried to get it working in Armbian, HDMI output was (is?) broken: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp...
RK35XX only worked well because volunteer maintainers like Joshua Riek were doing hard work, the support of those boards falls when people like him burn out.
For me personally, much of the value of the RPI products is knowing they will have long term support.
RockChip really only appears to care about embedded auto apps etc...thus their support horizon is more about sustainment and not enhancement, and they do little to support the community.
Support is everything for these boards. At least that's the way I see it. I looked into replacing my rpi4 with some other manufacturer but I see a lot of issues with support, mainly older kernels work, some even have some obscure builds that you have to download from some forums. Where my 4 still works fine on latest kernel. Even my rpi2 if I'm not mistaken, though didn't try it lately.
I have had an Orange Pi 5 max for about six months, still can't get it to boot with a serial console attached which makes it hard to port any alternative operating systems to it.
It's an archlinux PKGBUILD that applies a couple patches for the device drivers and HDMI. This can probably be repurposed to build on any linux distro. Obviously flash your firmware with caution, but it's been booting from SPI to NVME without any issue for a while now.
If there is more interest in this, I can fully flesh this out.
I think that my problem is similar to this [1]. Have tried more than one USB to serial adaptor with the same result, the adaptors work fine on other boards.
The board boots Armbian fine with nothing connected to the serial port.
> A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.
If only we could have somehow predicted this. I mean who could have predicted that a company that has never released hardware documentation and screwed over individual users in preference to corporate users during shortages would get in the way of porting other OSes. <shocked Pikachu face>
I mean, it's not like people have been bitching about this for more than a goddamn decade.
If only we could have forseen this <rolls eyes>.
An RPI5 4GB is exactly the same price and form factor as the Beagle Y-AI. You can help the folks trying to do this right or not. The choice is yours.
Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.
> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.
It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).
But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.
I’m a long time user of raspberry pis for various tinkering projects. I think the GPIO and camera interface are important, but also the size. The pi zero I would consider to be generally the most functional format of the pis.
Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.
There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.
These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).
> But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis.
Feelings over facts, at least you acknowledge it.
The success of (and the issues with) the raspberry pi mainly derive from it being mistaken for a good home-server platform. It's not, it's awful for that use case. For pretending it to be an embedded systems platform (either for prototyping or to later target the compute modules for production usage) sure, it's great.
It's all fine as long as the (computing) needs are low and budget is not an issue.
The problem, imho, is that it's amazing right up to a point where it isn't. It's tiny, noiseless, sips power....while providing what you need it to. Until one day the service you set up is not available anymore, the Pi isn't responding on the network, and then you check and the microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone. Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.
I didn't say that. It's just a reply based on my personal experience - I've set up probably 10-12 raspberry pis around my home for various projects, they all died due to SD corruption within a year. My intel-based NAS has worked fine for 8 years with no issues, then I finally replaced it with a newer one, that's now been running for 6 years. Obviously, anecdotes, the intel server is a lot more expensive, yes yes yes. But like OP said, Pis are not a great choice for anything like a home server because they aren't very reliable(imho) - maybe that works for your usecase, or maybe for most peoples usecases. I'm personally steering away from them except for some hobby tinkering.
> Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.
You can get that from any homelab setup though. Personally, I long since went the route of regularly setting up my Pis from scratch using Ansible - that way I at least know that I didn't forget to commit any manual changes made.
Pi-specific, my recommendation is to have a serious power supply. For the old Pis with Micro USB, Meanwell makes good ones, link that with a good wire gauge (18 AWG or more) and off you go. New Pis with USB-C, Anker power supply and a decent USB-C cable... that solves a lot of microSD corruption issues because the power regulation to the card isn't that good and just passes through brownouts/undervoltage conditions.
And the second recommendation, use "industrial" microSD cards, preferably those that are SLC. Grab them from Mouser, yes they are a bit more expensive than "normal" microSD cards but will live so much longer.
The whole RPI builds on the gadget fetishism of people, especially males. Oh, I have a base board, now I need a camera, now I need a box, now I need an nvme extension, now my box is useless, now I 3d print one, now I need another useless gimmick.
Now it costs a lot of helluva money. And in the end it's useless 90% of the time.
> Sadly, having a microSD Express card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 does not make a lot of sense at this point due to the cost of MicroSD Express card. An M.2 NVMe SSD is cheaper... For those reasons, [we] will not manufacture the HAT, but the design is released under a permissive MIT license, so anybody could manufacture it if needed. Maybe a microSD Express slot will make sense in a future Raspberry Pi 6, as prices come down.
I don't think anyone's using this for bulk storage in a serious way, but it's a great way to get started tinkering with the media and the interface.
The microcontroller on the hat is there to issue some SD-interface commands to light up the PCIe interface, and that's a combination sure to expose some interesting behaviors.
I would avoid using SD cards and go for something else like M.2 or NVMe for storage. SD cards tend to be on the lesser side in terms of performance, failure rate, and silicon quality in general.
MicroSD Express is basically NVMe, protocol-wise (which is almost directly PCIe), with extra bells like old microSD support, packed into very small package with worse thermals and for extra price. Don't see a reason to use it if you can stick to M.2 NVMe
If MicroSD Express adds direct PCIe support in that tiny, uncooled form factor, it would be nice to see some actual benchmarks with that Hat due to throttling.
As someone who runs a business that sells thousands of Raspberry Pis, the idea of encouraging more users to store data on microSD cards is quite concerning to me.
The introduction of the m.2 HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 has been a game changer, not just in terms of speed, but also in significantly improving disk/filesystem reliability.
I guess all I'm saying is, for the love of God, if you've got a choice and need to store data on a Pi5, please use the m.2 HAT + SSD from Raspberry Pi. Unlike other fruit companies, the prices for the SSDs are quite reasonable.
If you’ve got a choice get something else lol. The m2 hat blocks the cpu heatsink, and doesn’t fit into most cases. It blows my mind why was m2 not just built in already…
You can get an n100 mini pc for $100 with more ram and like 5x perf for same price
Should any enterprising vendor other than Lexar/Longsys figure out how to deliver 1TB MicroSD Express cards, a million rabid switch 2 owners are waiting to pounce...
Imagine you’d like to experiment with a remotely accessible webcam - for instance, streaming over RTSP - without necessarily running YOLO or other detection models on the device itself.
Which board-and-camera combination would you choose?
Whilst the headlined article is interesting, it's a case of the new and shiny distracting from regressions in what already exists.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is lacking in some fairly basic support that the Pi 4 has. There's no TianoCore, no NetBSD, no FreeBSD, no OpenBSD, no OmniOS(CE) … in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS. A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.
* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...
* https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/#index6h2
* https://www.freebsd.org/where/#download
* https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html
* https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/
So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.
> in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS
How do you figure? E.g. OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Kali, and Zephyr all offer official image support. Others have unofficial support, e.g. I think FreeBSD actually falls in this boat.
That's "easy" when all they have to do is to package https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
Zephyr is not Linux, btw.
And if I'm not mistaken even Archlinux ARM should work.
For the Raspberry Pi 4, did they ever release an image you didn't need to chroot into and update before it would boot?
A lot of linux native software example redshift still does not work on the rpi. Lot of things are broken. Recently i tried to use it as a basic desktop replacement until my new laptop arrives. Does a terrible f job.
A 10 year old celeron n2930 based mini pc i purchased for 30$ at a scrapper performs way better than the pi4. Ran esxi and bunch of vms on top of it aswell. Sips 10 w of power.
I tend to prefer small x86 boxes myself but the discussion here was supposed regressions on the Pi 5's ability to run anything but the official OS, not general dislikes. Similarly, I think the Redshift thing is actually an X11/Wayland debate.
I used my RP5 as my main machine for the better part of a month. It worked surprisingly well, even with just an SD card.
I’ve noticed most of the replies to your comment address the first half, and none (as of right now) address the second:
> So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.
If by “this” you mean the MicroSD Express hat from the article: this is a hobby project produced by a hobbyist, who seems to have no plans to sell or mass produce it.
It is unfair to the creator for you to lump it in with, and draw a conclusion from, the works produced by Raspberry Pi Holdings.
Nothing apart from Raspbian ... and Ubuntu
https://ubuntu.com/certified/202310-32202
What does tianocore do for raspberry pi? is it just a shim to add uefi?
Yes; it means you can, for example, install an off-the-shelf copy of Debian. See https://github.com/pftf/RPi4.
In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports.
Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).
Yes, it is. And that in turn enables fairly simple installation of NetBSD and suchlike, which have ARM ports that know how to talk to and layer themselves on top of EFI firmware.
An interesting further little feature of TianoCore particularly for Pi 4 users is that it maintains a fake hardware clock. It only ticks forward when the firmware is in boot services mode; it is persisted to the firmware's own image file in the EFI System Partition; and it isn't as effective as even a simple fake-hwclock utility. But it does satisfy the operating systems that assume that there must be a hardware clock, because every computer is PC98-compatible.
we've happily running on routers on the pi5/cm5 since last year (https://www.supernetworks.org) and openwrt support is there as well.
Raspbian works perfectly fine. Most of those other operating systems don’t really have the best GPIO support which is where Raspberry Pi shines. I’d just get a cheap mini pc if I wanted to run something else.
Except the RPi is smaller, lighter, lower power and more efficient than most mini PCs. It also has a bunch of unique addon boards, many (most?) of which don't really use GPIOs, but a standard communication interface like PCIe/USB/serial/SPI/I2C.
No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.
An arduino board with a esp32 added to it can do a lot of things(minus some cam/image recognition stuff) for half the price.
Rpi is strictly suited to very specific use cases.
I've deployed my fair share of both and SBCs are still a very widely useful middle ground. Being able to use existing Linux tools instead of limited or nonexistent embedded libraries is a huge benefit. Most things to do with sound or video, for example, are totally infeasible with microcontrollers. A mini PC is noticably bigger and you need to add a microcontroller over USB if you need absolutely any real world interaction (even something as simple as sensing ambient light to adjust brightness).
My new favourite tool for these situations is the Radxa X4, which is the exact dimensions of a RPi, but with an Intel x86 CPU and an onboard microcontroller to drive GPIOs.
RPi dropped the ball relative to the competition. Orange Pi boards outperform them for a fraction of the price. There are very few use-cases where Raspberry is preferable.
I just googled Orange Pi, tried to click on the first result, which is their website. But they have no https site set up, so I got no host. Http works but only on iOS safari, that's a bit weird. Is this CN net weirdness?
I got something similar last year. That was the reminder I needed that software competency actually matters too, and I went with RPi.
Just wait until you try downloading Orange Pi's OS...
I think the RPi 4 is still competitive. At ~40$, Orange Pi's boards are Allwinner H618 and Rockchip RK3566 based boards. I do have an Orange Pi 3B in use because it has an nvme port, but the RPi 4 is generally faster.
The Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 are just too expensive. I do have some of the Pi 5s from both these companies, but have replaced them with Intel N100 mini-PCs instead. But I'll still use RPi 4's for my 3d printers and other lower-end uses.
And RPi's software support is just better: I've got an Orange Pi 4. Orange Pi hasn't updated their OS for it in years. Last time I tried to get it working in Armbian, HDMI output was (is?) broken: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp...
Orange Pi also has Rockchip RK3588 based boards.
RK35XX only worked well because volunteer maintainers like Joshua Riek were doing hard work, the support of those boards falls when people like him burn out.
For me personally, much of the value of the RPI products is knowing they will have long term support.
RockChip really only appears to care about embedded auto apps etc...thus their support horizon is more about sustainment and not enhancement, and they do little to support the community.
Where can I download the documentation for the BCM2712 in the RPi 5?
I can get this for the RK3588 though there are problems with my Orange Pi board that uses it.
Support is everything for these boards. At least that's the way I see it. I looked into replacing my rpi4 with some other manufacturer but I see a lot of issues with support, mainly older kernels work, some even have some obscure builds that you have to download from some forums. Where my 4 still works fine on latest kernel. Even my rpi2 if I'm not mistaken, though didn't try it lately.
I have had an Orange Pi 5 max for about six months, still can't get it to boot with a serial console attached which makes it hard to port any alternative operating systems to it.
Wouldn't that be a uboot issue? Perhaps you could piggy-back on this effort.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1buzts4/uboot_v20...
Here's something I kinda threw together that gets EDK2 usable on an OrangePi 5 max. https://github.com/RAMJAC-digital/edk2-rk3588/tree/main
It's an archlinux PKGBUILD that applies a couple patches for the device drivers and HDMI. This can probably be repurposed to build on any linux distro. Obviously flash your firmware with caution, but it's been booting from SPI to NVME without any issue for a while now.
If there is more interest in this, I can fully flesh this out.
I think that my problem is similar to this [1]. Have tried more than one USB to serial adaptor with the same result, the adaptors work fine on other boards.
The board boots Armbian fine with nothing connected to the serial port.
[1] https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/1073
I don't think so, it just doesn't power up with the serial cable connected.
> A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.
If only we could have somehow predicted this. I mean who could have predicted that a company that has never released hardware documentation and screwed over individual users in preference to corporate users during shortages would get in the way of porting other OSes. <shocked Pikachu face>
I mean, it's not like people have been bitching about this for more than a goddamn decade.
If only we could have forseen this <rolls eyes>.
An RPI5 4GB is exactly the same price and form factor as the Beagle Y-AI. You can help the folks trying to do this right or not. The choice is yours.
If there only was a way to boot an OS without having to port said OS to the exact piece of hardware...
It seems the ARM SystemReady stuff is only for big iron.
[dead]
Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.
> Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified.
It entirely depends on the purpose you use them for. Mini-PCs are good for PC-things, meaning raw power, storage, just running software. But they fall flat if you tinker with them. They usually don't have GPIO, nore a community build around hacking and tinkering with them (AFAIK).
But here is the thing, many people were using raspis for those software-jobs, as NAS, homeserver, mediacenter, gamestation, they have no need for tinkering and GPIO. So this group of people is totally fine with a mini-pc, and maybe even should stay with them, and giving the raspi room to focus on its original purpose again.
I’m a long time user of raspberry pis for various tinkering projects. I think the GPIO and camera interface are important, but also the size. The pi zero I would consider to be generally the most functional format of the pis.
Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.
There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.
These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).
> But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis.
Feelings over facts, at least you acknowledge it.
The success of (and the issues with) the raspberry pi mainly derive from it being mistaken for a good home-server platform. It's not, it's awful for that use case. For pretending it to be an embedded systems platform (either for prototyping or to later target the compute modules for production usage) sure, it's great.
It's all fine as long as the (computing) needs are low and budget is not an issue.
> It's not, it's awful for that use case
I'd be inclined to slightly agree with you on Raspberry Pi 4 and older, but the 5 is a whole lot different beast with a leap forward in performance.
>> It's not, it's awful for that use case.
The problem, imho, is that it's amazing right up to a point where it isn't. It's tiny, noiseless, sips power....while providing what you need it to. Until one day the service you set up is not available anymore, the Pi isn't responding on the network, and then you check and the microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone. Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.
> microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone
Unlike Intel servers, where corruption of the boot media is of course of no consequences.
I didn't say that. It's just a reply based on my personal experience - I've set up probably 10-12 raspberry pis around my home for various projects, they all died due to SD corruption within a year. My intel-based NAS has worked fine for 8 years with no issues, then I finally replaced it with a newer one, that's now been running for 6 years. Obviously, anecdotes, the intel server is a lot more expensive, yes yes yes. But like OP said, Pis are not a great choice for anything like a home server because they aren't very reliable(imho) - maybe that works for your usecase, or maybe for most peoples usecases. I'm personally steering away from them except for some hobby tinkering.
I'd say that to painlessly use Raspberry Pi, one has to be aware of the glaring shortcomings of SD cards as root storage.
> Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.
You can get that from any homelab setup though. Personally, I long since went the route of regularly setting up my Pis from scratch using Ansible - that way I at least know that I didn't forget to commit any manual changes made.
Pi-specific, my recommendation is to have a serious power supply. For the old Pis with Micro USB, Meanwell makes good ones, link that with a good wire gauge (18 AWG or more) and off you go. New Pis with USB-C, Anker power supply and a decent USB-C cable... that solves a lot of microSD corruption issues because the power regulation to the card isn't that good and just passes through brownouts/undervoltage conditions.
And the second recommendation, use "industrial" microSD cards, preferably those that are SLC. Grab them from Mouser, yes they are a bit more expensive than "normal" microSD cards but will live so much longer.
[1] https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDQED-008G-XI
The whole RPI builds on the gadget fetishism of people, especially males. Oh, I have a base board, now I need a camera, now I need a box, now I need an nvme extension, now my box is useless, now I 3d print one, now I need another useless gimmick.
Now it costs a lot of helluva money. And in the end it's useless 90% of the time.
Bit of a “why does this exist” product to me.
If you’re going to use pcie lanes anyway then stick a m.2 at the end of it to benefit from mass scale of nvme drive production.
I also have a general distrust of sd cards and their write levelling. Maybe just rotten luck or fake ones but they never seem to last
The article covers this:
> Sadly, having a microSD Express card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 does not make a lot of sense at this point due to the cost of MicroSD Express card. An M.2 NVMe SSD is cheaper... For those reasons, [we] will not manufacture the HAT, but the design is released under a permissive MIT license, so anybody could manufacture it if needed. Maybe a microSD Express slot will make sense in a future Raspberry Pi 6, as prices come down.
I don't think anyone's using this for bulk storage in a serious way, but it's a great way to get started tinkering with the media and the interface.
The microcontroller on the hat is there to issue some SD-interface commands to light up the PCIe interface, and that's a combination sure to expose some interesting behaviors.
I lost interest in getting Pi when I realized a mini PC is about the same price and will have specs that are about the same or a little better.
Mini-PCs are quite a bit better dollar for dollar.
Pi's were great when they were cheap, but now the Raspberry Pi has IPO'd those days are over.
The Raspberry Pi 5 should have a m.2 slot by default. Even if it's one of those short ones to maintain form factor.
I would avoid using SD cards and go for something else like M.2 or NVMe for storage. SD cards tend to be on the lesser side in terms of performance, failure rate, and silicon quality in general.
Does that apply to MicroSD Express?
MicroSD Express is basically NVMe, protocol-wise (which is almost directly PCIe), with extra bells like old microSD support, packed into very small package with worse thermals and for extra price. Don't see a reason to use it if you can stick to M.2 NVMe
Yes. The,re better, but thermals are killer
If MicroSD Express adds direct PCIe support in that tiny, uncooled form factor, it would be nice to see some actual benchmarks with that Hat due to throttling.
As someone who runs a business that sells thousands of Raspberry Pis, the idea of encouraging more users to store data on microSD cards is quite concerning to me.
The introduction of the m.2 HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 has been a game changer, not just in terms of speed, but also in significantly improving disk/filesystem reliability.
I guess all I'm saying is, for the love of God, if you've got a choice and need to store data on a Pi5, please use the m.2 HAT + SSD from Raspberry Pi. Unlike other fruit companies, the prices for the SSDs are quite reasonable.
If you’ve got a choice get something else lol. The m2 hat blocks the cpu heatsink, and doesn’t fit into most cases. It blows my mind why was m2 not just built in already… You can get an n100 mini pc for $100 with more ram and like 5x perf for same price
Even plain USB thumb drives are far more stable than SD cards. I suspect more room for capacitors that enable finishing writes on power out.
I’ve had Samsung SlimFit USB drives with BTRFS last for years on rpi3s and rpi4s.
Sadly you can't really buy the cards for love or money right now.
Should any enterprising vendor other than Lexar/Longsys figure out how to deliver 1TB MicroSD Express cards, a million rabid switch 2 owners are waiting to pounce...
Imagine you’d like to experiment with a remotely accessible webcam - for instance, streaming over RTSP - without necessarily running YOLO or other detection models on the device itself.
Which board-and-camera combination would you choose?