If you give it fast enough "disk" storage it really moves. I plugged in a Kingston brand 120GB SSD on a USB3 adapter. hdparm -t gave 292MB/s read speed and the default LXDE environment was really crisply responsive, with even a first launch of Chromium taking less than two seconds. With such good storage, the only real limitation is that heavy Javascript stuff is too slow - 5+ seconds to switch between folders in Chrome, or for the thumbnail gallery to appear in Youtube. Also, video calling is marginal. Aside from that the CPU is fast enough.
Then I accidentally yanked a cable. And the SSD was bricked. I was able to unbrick it again with the long-powerup-without-data-cable trick, but plainly this setup is too fragile.
USB boot is a game changer. A junk drawer 8GB USB stick works just fine, aside from the fact that it takes many minutes to copy the OS image onto it in the first place.
An old 60GB SATA laptop hard disk in the same USB3 case that I tried the SSD in is pretty good. About like a decent SD card, but without the scary wear/corruption issues. I can post the brand (Can$14 on Amazon) and the workaround needed for its broken (or at least Linux incompatible) UAS.
Bluetooth Audio actually works. In the typical use case, with this thing plugged via HDMI/DVI adapter into an old junk monitor, you can use additional clutter, like a $3 USB headset adapter and computer speakers to get sound or at least plug in a headphone. But if you have a bluetooth headphone or speaker, you don't need cables at all. I can post the recipe that worked for me for this.
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 fiddling with kernel issues (USB attached SCSI) that a Raspberry Pi with built-in eMMC would be a breath of fresh air.
They could even keep costs down by adding a connector for an eMMC submodule, similar to what ODROID has done with their boards.
But they walk a fine balance with PCB space, backward compatibility, performance, cost and user-friendliness.
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.
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.
To be honest the large majority of RPi users I have ever met are only adults. Are there a lot of kids who are using it out there?
Even if they removed the SD slot, you would still reflash the board over USB. That's how it's done with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. With some software development it could be even easier than fiddling with SD cards.
In education environments, microSD cards tend to disappear a lot. Having one less moving piece to lose would be a win.
The Pi themselves don't die because of a SD corruption. Only the SD cards do (and they can be recovered).
[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/
[1] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/bcm2711/bcm2711-periphera...
Jeff Geerling benchmarked it and found it faster than his fastest SD card: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-compute-...
It's definitely not NVMe fast, but it's perfect for average workloads.
IIRC the layers above SDIO are slightly different for eMMC and SD(HC), but generally SoCs that have SDIO interface support both types of memory.
For example, the microSD slot only has 4 data lines. eMMC isn't constrained to the microSD slot, so they can have 8 data lines.
The Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module has onboard eMMC. Jeff Geerling tests a lot of SD cards on the Raspberry Pi, but he found the CM4's eMMC is faster than any SD card he's ever tested: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-compute-...
I'm not against on board storage but I understand the tradeoff to allow user expandability and reduce production costs. I think they'd get heat on the eMMC size unless it was like 32gb and I don't think that cost increase would make it very far. But maybe with the push to the 400 they will start to go that route to create a self contained but expandable system that is plug and play raspbian by default.
https://www.slrlounge.com/sd-express-memory-cards-pcle-nvme/
It's sort of like Elon Musk saying on Electric Vehicles: "We could make the car infinitely desirable, but if someone does not have the money, they won't buy it"
Just pull up https://www.raspberrypi.org and you'll immediately see "someone" is kids.
So I think the fiddling is a given, maybe part of the experience, and usually there's a payoff.
that said I'm not immune to wishful thinking. I think an expensive $150 Pi Pro that makes a profit would be cool. Think mini-itx, pcie, m.2 and memory slots PLUS gpios.
That's actually a good thing, the raspberry pi community uncovered a ton of issues over the years related to storage drives over USB, which has been or can now be patched in the kernel to make such things more reliable.
Performance is roughly on par with the core 2 duo in the mini, but the graphics is more powerful and fully supported by webgl, so in practice it struggles less with the scratch environment and online games than the mini did. I would however not consider it snappy, it is quite sluggish to use chromium on it. I got both netflix and disney plus to work with minimal effort but disney plus is very slow to load, it takes almost a minute to fully pop up. It does play fine when streaming video.
The kids so far are quite happy and have been using it a lot more than they used the mac mini. It does everything they want (online educational games, some digital homework, and scratch), and they're not bothered by the sluggish loading of some sites. I think they also like the way it looks, it is a very fun looking little computer.
But I'd hardly consider that "minimal effort" in the general case. Did you find a better way?
Edit: also, Chrome itself. How did you manage that?
The RPi400 with Pico-8 seems to tick the same boxes, so I got one for my 10yr old. He's loving it. Perfect use case.
[0] https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181109020203/https://www.risco...
(IA link as it's been removed from the site, but the installer is still available via IA).
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python/READM...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python-games...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
Especially with side-by-side with a Minecraft window and the Minecraft Pi Edition python integration.
Also, there's a whole lot of little boards that support Micropython, and boot straight to it, including ESP32 etc. I use them in the classes I teach.
> I was able to unbrick it
I know it's a nitpick, but if it can be repaired, it's not bricked.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/
To you and me:
Static electricity from the carpet discharging into the joystick port of a Commodore 64? Bricked.
Yanked a cable from my Raspberry Pi and had to reboot in an unconventional manner? Not bricked.
How would you called a device that meets a fate like that? Stuck? Blocked? Unaccessible?
As an example, if I have a network device so screwed up that I have to do a little power and connection dance to get it to reload via tftp, I'd call that a soft brick. If I have to solder in jtag pins, that's pretty firm. If the magic smoke has come out, that's definitely hard.
Edit: To be more constructive, how about a definition for “bricked” as “unable to be recovered by the intended users of the device through reasonably expected efforts.”
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 specialized skill. They might not know what to do with a laptop if you blanked its SSD, but we wouldn't call that laptop bricked.
A modern computer should have suspend/resume. This doesn't, but all kitted out with accessories - 7 port USB hub, USB headset, spinning laptop hard disk - it idles at 6-7 watts, plus it boots fast and shuts down almost instantly, so that's not a big issue.
Now for a list of things that I think this is good for:
1. As an accessory to the family TV - for online video that the "smart TV" is too dumb for, for games and such.
2. As a classroom computer, with a few sample setups.
2a. Overlay mode (i.e. immutable SD card image and no wear) and everyone uses the same generic userID but then logs into their own google account.
2b. Overlay mode, immutable SD card image and everyone brings a USB stick to store their data on.
2c. Completely diskless mode, everyone has a USB stick they boot from (this works very well even with a typical slow USB stick).
2d. Completely diskless mode, PXE boot from a server (needs gigabit wired ethernet for adequate performance)
2e. Like 2c but with NFS home directories. This needs some sort of centralized account management.
Practical as that is, probably Chromebooks are too well established for this to get any traction.
3. As the standard experimenter's Raspi. Costs about the same as a Raspi4 with a good aluminum fanless case, so you get the keyboard for free.
4. As a small NAS/DVR/whatever server node. Same as 3. You get Raspi4 performance and passive cooling for about the same price but a free keyboard.
5. As an extra homework/Youtube/whatever screen in a screen-constrained budget conscious family. Get a $10 monitor from Craigslist/Kijiji, a $2 HDMI/DVI adapter for it and you're off. Except for the sound thing; suggest Bluetooth for minimum clutter for that.
Really a practical little machine, comparable to a decent 10-12 year old laptop with an SSD upgrade.
I had to set my user agent to Windows/Edge to make it work in Firefox. However, I can't remember if the audio/video worked.
> Then I accidentally yanked a cable. And the SSD was bricked.
People who are going to use this as as their setup ought to buy a real, fast USB SSD, instead of relying on SSD drives plugged into adapters. They're engineered to deal with stuff like this and they're fast. (the Samsung T5 and T7 both benchmark even faster than what you saw, well above 300MB/s)
Would be nice for the next Pi to have an M.2 slot tho...
What's the long-powerup-without-data-cable trick, if that's not a stupid question? Sounds like a useful thing to know!
https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
1. Lack of 3.5mm audio jack or built-in microphone/speakers 2. Unable to run Zoom reliably
Given that schools are closed (at least in India) and classes are happening over zoom, these two drawbacks makes it a no-go for my use case.
"Getting audio out of the Pi 400 was a bit of a challenge; it defaulted to attempting to deliver audio over HDMI, and Raspberry Pi OS' audio control dialog isn't the best. Even after changing the output device to USB Audio (my gaming headset), YouTube wasn't producing audio—and there's no "test" button I could find in Pi OS, like the one in Ubuntu's audio-control dialog. Closing and reopening the browser entirely after changing the output device resolved the issue, and audio played from the headset fine afterward." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/raspberry-pi-400-the...
So to get the usual 3.5mm jacks, just buy a cheap USB/analog headset adapter; about $3 from Ali Express. Select as input and output, and done. Microphone is usually not an issue if you're using a webcam since most have an adequate one built in.