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Comment by tarruda | Hacker News Reader

I would consider using this for serious work if they had added support for 2.5 or m.2 drives.

There are some third party raspberry pi 4 cases that support m.2 via an internal USB 3.0 adapter [1].

Considering they designed a custom PCB for this product, adding a native M.2 or SATA is a reasonable feature for something designed to replace a desktop PC

[1]: https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...

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There aren't any free PCIe lanes on the SoC, so even if they added a bridge chip for a SATA / M.2 SSD it would have to be connected over USB.

Besides, the device is $70. A $10 32GB eMMC chip would be a far more reasonable ask at this price point if greater reliability is desired.

that's interesting. curios: are these two comparable in terms of speeds: eMMC and NVME/M2SSD ? or am I confusing among oranges and apples?

They are in completely different ball parks. M.2 drives can easily saturate a usb3.0 link, emmc not so much.

eMMC tops out at 80-100 mb/s, NVME is an order of magnitude faster usually.

I see, thanks.

Have you seen the compute module though? It exposes a PCIe slot via a separate I/O board. At first I assumed there was some free lanes, but now I see it doesn't exposea usb 3.0 ports, only 2.0.

Still, I would rather have a dedicated bus for storage with usb 2.0 rather than usb 3.0

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia...

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