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

Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by Teknoman117 on Friday November 20, 2020 @04:24PM (#25165160)

The speed would be much better than an SD card, but nowhere near the peak M.2 performance we've come to love. The SoC they use only has a single lane of PCIe Gen 2. So 500 MB/s peak (MB, not MiB) with large transfers.

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.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by arcticbull on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:26AM (#25168181)

What's really hindering responsiveness and day-to-day performance isn't going to be sequential read and write speeds but rather 4K random IOPS.

SD cards are not all designed or optimized around small, random reads and writes - the typical workload of a boot drive - and latencies can be staggering. Similar for USB sticks. On the other hand, these days the overwhelming majority of M.2 SSDs are at least somewhat optimized for 4K IOPS. The latest Sabrent Rocket M2 SSDs get some 650,000 4K IOPS vs eMMC at ~13000 (the Rocket is 50X faster) an SD card around ~2000 (the Rocket is 325X faster).

Frankly if you stuck a Sabrent Rocket on a PCIe 1.0 x1 connector the performance would absolute savage an SD or eMMC solution on this workload. Even if they somehow also had identical sequential I/O specs.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by m-p-3 on Friday November 20, 2020 @04:42PM (#25165386)

If they add a m.2 slot now, at least it's already there for the next revision which they could improve the PCIe lane.

And hopefully that would ensure the new form factor to be somewhat stable for a while after that.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by smileybarry on Friday November 20, 2020 @08:06PM (#25167023)

They could add a SATA M.2 slot, then it's equivalent to using a 2.5" SATA SSD but in a neater form factor.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by TheRealPomax on Friday November 20, 2020 @11:03PM (#25167789)

500MBPS is already 1.5x SSD speed, so... I'd take it over SD any day of the week! Especially since at those speeds, you can buy just any random cheap m.2 and come out well on top.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by bufferoverflow on Saturday November 21, 2020 @09:06AM (#25169790)

500 MB/s is more than enough for most applications.

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