Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

crispyambulance

One thing I've always been curious about is hardware for mass-writing of sdcards.

I've setup manufacturing stations for this and I've never been able to find truly robust gang-programmers for sdcards. Luckily my stuff was all low volume so it wasn't a serious problem.

But it seems like there's no "manufacturing grade" gang programmers for sdcards. The stuff that is out there is just infinitely re-branded chinese "white-label" hardware-- just a lot of different "vendors" for a few different models of the basically the same hardware.

My suspicion for there not being good options for gang-programming of sdcards is that savvy consumer manufacturers have realized what a headache it is to support sdcards in their products from the factory and thus opt to make the sdcard the customer's responsibility. In other words, they ship their products without sdcards and just require the customer to purchase the sdcard and program it if needed. I am not sure if my suspicions are justified, can anyone confirm if this is the case?

There is no reason at all to boot a raspberry pi 4 from an sdcard in 2021. It's the wrong tool for the job and the worst option you can choose.

https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 enables several alternatives, all faster and more reliable

* usb3 -> sata

* usb3 -> nvme

* iscsi

* ipxe

* netboot.xyz via pxe or usb

* usb thumbdrive

With stuff like this the "right tool" is whatever you have and usb3 -> sata adapters aren't all that common while functioning SD cards are.

Yeah there are crappy ones but if you stick to ~2GB and decent vendors (like most people do) you're unlikely to deal with them.

I just checked and it looks like netboot.xyz provides an sdcard image so no excuses :)

https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz-rpi4-sdcard.img

Edit - ok I guess being airgapped would be one, fair enough!

Decent vendors don't save you at scale, until you're in the millions of units per year kind of scale. Until the all but the 'industrial' cards are crappy. I've had the displeasure of trying to track down their issues before professionally.

I hope you guys get eMMC someday. It's great.

Depends on which RPi you use, the Compute Module 4 comes in 2/8/16/32MB eMMC flavors[1]

1: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/

If you have no external drive or network with a "boot server" like is probable most cases of use with RPi, is there a better option than an sdcard?

Also, how is a usb thumbdrive better than a sdcard?

reliability

With the Compute Module 4, two more possibilities open up:

* NVMe (native)

* eMMC

(SATA can be used natively, too, but you can't yet boot from a SATA drive on the Pi.)

But it's not uncommon to have devices boot from sdcards-- even industrial boards. Are you talking about "all" sdcards? Or just consumer stuff whose actual partnumber could change from order to order?

It's more uncommon nowadays. VMware has officially recommended against sdcard boot, which used to be fairly popular. The SD card option is still usually available but generally recommended against when getting blades or pizzaboxes from HPE, Cisco and Dell. For various reasons it's now nearly the same price to toss 2x nvme drives in, instead of the SD card raid controller and SD card mounting assembly. TCO is definitely lower due to the write resilience of your typical nvme flash drive compared to an SD card, physical work swapping parts can be way more expensive than a small capital increase.

If you buy them in volume, you can buy them with the data already on from the manufacturer. I'm pretty sure it's programmed into the flash before the flash is assembled into the sdcard packaging.

You can do a similar thing with microcontrollers - if you're buying sufficient volume the manufacturer will supply them with your program already on, saving you a manufacturing step.

Yes, I've done that before for flash IC's. It works out nicely for "large enough" order quantities. I would expect that doing that for sdcards would require even larger quantities to be economically viable.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/pro

Ohhh! that's new! I will bookmark.

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