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djsumdog

Wonder if we'll see these on the Raspberry Pi 5 and other embedded boards?

This is pretty amazing; much better than the current eMMC and SDCard based storage solutions on a lot of dev boards.

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RockPi has a full size M.2 connector that accepts most NVMe drives:

http://rockpi.org/

I bought one of these for fun, with the whole kit, NVMe drive and a nice aluminum case... not sure what I am going to do with it but it's a really nice little PC and amazing what it can do.

I bought a Rock Pi 4 and the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Just finished doing some benchmarking and it has pretty impressive performance, but it definitely needs assistance staying cool. The case I have is aluminum with the bottom of the case being a whole-board heatsink, and I still had to set it on top of ice packs with a fan blowing to keep it from throttling under heavy benchmarking load.

I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.

Or... you could make your own Extra Fancy case: https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272

Ongoing work on the reverse-engineered Panfrost OpenGL ES driver for Arm Mali GPUs has turned the RK3399 SoC into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rock...

Is it better than SD Express though, which also supports PCIe and is backwards compatible with existing cards?

I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.

I'm running a batch of SBCs which boot from SD cards as home or forgettable servers. None of them died due to SD card failure yet. A good SD card with a little optimization keeps the flash media wear out at bay.

What little optimizations?

Like writing logs to RAM and syncing back to disk daily or only on reboots/shutdowns, keeping high-write applications on a USB drive and providing the biggest cache possible by slimming down the OS memory footprint.

This two things reduce the hits to SD card substantially.

> RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards

How does the Raspberry Pi deteriorate from the interaction with the SD card?

It has more to do with the garbage $2 power supply someone had "lying around".

This doesn't seem to be targeted at the frequently-swapped use cases that SD cards are made for. It's more about adding repairability/upgradability to internal primary storage in small devices. For that use case, the 4x throughput advantage is probably reason enough to rule out SD Express.

Hardkernel saw this need and addressed it; their boards use an eMMC daughterboard with a standardized connector that I could swear I've seen picked up by a few other vendors now.

I wonder if they'll switch over to this on some future generation.

Never happening on something in the RPi price range; that socket will be far too expensive.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but no RaspPi has a PCIe interface, yet. From the embedded side of things, I would expect that to be a whole Pi generation out. Even then, I’m honestly not sure what the use case is, the Pi is doing amazing things with SPI and USB.

The RPi 4 uses PCIe to interface with the USB 3 controller. However it doesn't provide an external interface for it.

You can, of course, hack your own together :)

http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express...

The USB 3.0 controller on the Pi 4 is connected via PCIe.

https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b...

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