I have a Raspberry Pi and I use an SD card because what I’m using it for doesn’t require anything more. If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device and maybe petition the Foundation to add it in a future model.
Right tool for the job and all that.
I'm quite curious as to how this is "cringe"worthy. I can certainly see how mechanically stable attached storage is preferable in a lot of situations, but people use Pi's for a vast array of uses, and I cannot imagine that every use case, or even a significant majority of them should be barred from USB attached storage.
One of the leading reasons for using USB attached storage on the Pi is to avoid SD card corruption issues.
Measured the resistance of the "USB charging cable" I had used for it and found it was 1 Ohm! So when the Pi peaked at 1A current draw, the cable dropped 1V.
Swapped it out for something proper (<0.1 Ohm), and haven't had issues since.
In the end I gave up on trying to find low-ohm cables and just wired directly to the power supply. It's surprising how many cables just plain suck.
With an SSD you are increasing power consumption on USB which is limited to around 1.2A or however much power supply allows.
Note: I havent had any corruptions past year on pi3... all I changed was power supply, sd card and using aarch64
I've been wanting to build a 4-bay SBC NAS for years now, but I haven't been able to bring myself to trust the community and support for some of the other boards that do give you direct access to the PCIe bus so you can actually get decent performance.
Now I'm waiting for someone to come up with something based on the Compute Module 4... (There was a post about someone designing a PCB for something that would do the trick the other day, but it requires some 0.4mm pitch soldering skills that I just don't have the equipment for.)
>"...If you need fast storage I believe you should buy an appropriate device"
Frankly you can cringe all you want but it is really up to the owner to decide how they use their hardware. Your opinion about it is irrelevant as people have their unique situation and are quite capable to weigh all pros and cons of whatever they decide to do.