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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone

Oh dear. That will involve the process of flashing OS onto the Pi and will increase the risk of bricking it. That is the reason for using SD cards instead of a NAND chip.

Secondly, you can't upgrade the storage on it either and would have to choose a RPi with fixed storage space on it. Might as well get a M1 Mac Mini.

I cannot imagine having to choose a future RPi 5 having either a 8GB, 16GB, 32GB NAND' and being unable to upgrade the space on it. So no thanks and no deal to (2).

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I agree, I have enough bad experience with on-board NAND from other SBCs; it's no fun at all.

The SD cards are nice for most use cases, but on some boards I'd really like to see a SATA port or M.2 slot which can be booted from and a x4 PCIe port (even if through an optional board or a HAT).

I see the SD cards on the Raspis as modern floppy discs. They are good to have, but not ideal for some cases.

M.2 is the way

People have already achieved it by hardware hacking

Hardware hacking not necessary if you use the Compute Module 4; many boards are already integrating M.2 slots: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

My hope is the next Pi model B might include an M.2 slot (maybe 42mm long) on the bottom.

> many boards are already integrating M.2 slots: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

Which ones are you seeing with M.2 slots? I've clicked a good 5-8 of the top listings from that list for which it would make sense to have such slot and they're missing it.

I personally would not trade the hat real estate for an M.2 slot in most use cases. I use that hat slot for peripherals that enable unique and fun applications. Micro SD is horribly unreliable, but idk what the solution is without trading a significant amount of space.

Just because there's onboard storage doesn't mean they couldn't still give it an M.2 or something. And you can install an OS just fine by booting off USB, just as you'd do with any other computer.

The compute modules have a DFU mode and the flash tool loads a small binary to effectively turn it into a USB stick to write to the internal flash.

But that being said, I've burned out plenty an SD card. Haven't managed to do that to an eMMC module yet.

Also, on devices like the Beaglebone, you can use eMMC and an SD card at the same time.

On lots of pine boards you can flip a switch or short some pins to prevent the bootrom from using the SPI flash or eMMC. The SPI is not removable, but flashing a bad payload to it is not an unrecoverable error.

The BeagleBoneBlack has eMMC and an SD card and a hardware switch to force it to boot off the SD card. Plus, flash is rarely really bricked, you can just hook it up to an SPI bus...

If the Pi can still boot from USB, then you can re-flash the NAND. No chance of bricking it.

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