Hacker News Reader

Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

This looks pretty compelling - the only thing that bothers me a bit is that the eMMC seems to be soldered and not replaceable, giving it a much more limited lifespan, depending on how durable these eMMC modules are.

(Oh and BTW I had completely forgotten but cheers for the follow-up on TRIM/UASP for USB the other week :))

View on HN

Have you found reliability problems with eMMC? I've found it to be a lot more reliable than SD cards, faster too. Of course with 1 Gb networking you can move the heavy lifting storage for containers and VMs to something like Ceph and only use the eMMC for OS root disks and local storage.

For my Turing Pi, when it's delivered, I'm hoping to start with a small Kubernetes install for testing. Then when the TPi 2 is released next year, build a second one with CM4 modules for more involved Kubernetes testing/development while putting Ceph on the old one.

(To head off inevitable comment: no I'm not expecting this to perform well, and it's not for production work, it's purely for experimentation with clusters)

I've only tried one model so far (Samsung via Odroid) and yes, so far the reputation seems to hold that it's faster and more reliable than the supposedly best SD cards on the consumer market (and cheaper too!). But the underlying technology is the same and with several boards I'd expect to have at least some failures over the course of a year or so of continuous use.

The fact that they are soldered and not replaceable forces manufacturers to actually build quality storage. You can get away with bad SD cards but if the entire device is bricked then you will demand a complete replacement.

The "lite" versions don't have eMMC, so you would be free to put an SD card slot or similar on the carrier board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com