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Comment by peppercat10 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the RPi5 is finally enough for browsing the web and watching media without hiccups. My experience with RPi4 was too sluggish.

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Not saying this applies, but: The speed of the raspberry pi goes up dramatically when using a fast USB disk instead of micro SD. Most people start with a micro SD, and I had no idea how much faster a Pi could go.

I'll anecdotally confirm this - fast IO matters and sped my pi desktop up considerably.

Yeah I confirm too. Fast IO plus a little cooling fan makes the Pi 4 almost enough for daily desktop. I think the Pi 5 will get me all the way there.

It does apply to me - I never tried it with a USB disk. I'm getting an RPi5 eventually, and I'll try this out. Thanks for sharing!

With the Pi 5 you can do better than that, there's PCIe support and an official NVMe hat. Or will be eventually, anyway.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/09/40e82000-af3...

Awesome! Would love to hear if/how your experience changes

my 2¢: if external storage is not an option for some reason, dropping ext4 in favor for F2FS will do a lot of good for sparing your sdcard from early death (due to superblock updates happening every so often), if not for performance due to ext4 not being flash-aware by design.

If that's not an option AND your setup has no power issues (e.g. it has good power supply, externally powered usb hub etc), disabling journalling might also improve performance: tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdaXXX (can't do it on mounted fs, so either do it from initram consolee, do pivot_root to minimal fs in ram, or do it from another machine)

SD cards have a FTL internally; I'm not sure F2FS helps you much there.

F2FS was specifically designed for flash storage and takes FTL into account, unlike ext4. So it should help.

Now that the RPi 5 exposes a PCIe interface, I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more folks adopting it as a NAS.

If only FreeNAS (TrueNAS now?) would run on it

Does it not? what's the Pi missing? I assume truenas scale (the linux based one) would work better.

TrueNAS (the BSD one) also works fine when Virtualized under Linux

As far as I know there isn’t an ARM build of TrueNAS but I could be wrong

If the drives aren’t powered by the pi, then aren’t there going to be grounding issues with a NAS?

yes, m.2 slot when?

same for network

No cpu is ever enough for modern web.

This is true, or was true until Apple released the M1 / M2 chips.

Even then new Reddit makes safari stutter if scroll too long/several tabs

Crazy. I think this is why people stick to the old reddit design. Or use mobile, but is that properly using reddit?

Those chips magically solve the webs problems? Nope. I was given an M1 pro for work. Guess what? The web is still slow.

Disable, and then selectively re-enable JavaScript.

The web works again.

I have a 2013 macbook and browsing web is unusable, especially on these landing pages that have animations

Which is kind of silly because a cheap chinese phone of $100 can play media without problems, and it includes a screen.

The Pi's a bit limited due to its pretty terrible I/O performance, finicky power system and the insistance on sticking with old broadcom chips.

The broadcom thing made sense to begin with, they got a great deal on the pricing. But with the likes of the Rock Pro being pretty much on a price parallel now (and higher performing) it no longer makes sense.

That has more to do with the web ecosystem than the Raspberry Pi hardware.

It really doesn't. Cheap phones have browsed the web just fine for a long time, now. Raspberry Pi makes some weird hardware choices and have been suffering from it for a while. The insistence on SD cards (other manufacturers support eMMC or m.2 or both, and while RPi5 does now this has been the case elsewhere for A While) is the biggest problem with overall perf, including browsers.

I would expect the boards with the RK3588 to still be more pleasant to use than an RPi5, but the RPi5, used with an m.2 drive, should be significantly better.

How is MicroSD weird? A microSD card 1) is available at Officeworks etc, and 2) doesn't require soldering so imaging the OS can be done before your RasPi even arrives on your Windows/Mac computer.

In contrast eMMC is soldered onto the board, while the m.2 didn't even exist back in 2012 when the first RasPi launched.

It's not that SD cards don't have advantages, it's that they also have noted disadvantages in terms of speed and reliability, particularly when you factor in that people don't always buy the high end models.

In a time when computer programs habitually assume fast storage, running your operating system and primary runtime on a microSD card is weird. Even "fast" microSD storage usually isn't unless you buy cards that cost as much as the SBC in the first place. If you want some perf in the SD form factor you go to the full-size card--that's one reason cameras still use them--but even there you encounter pretty hard limits, which is why higher-end cameras have also gone to SSD-over-USB-C and CFExpress Type B.

eMMC does not have to be soldered-on, either; the Orange Pi 5+ has a swappable eMMC module.

This is the pi5, not the pi1. Technology marches on. Maybe the SD made sense in 2012, but that doesn't mean it still makes sense in 2023.

Cheap phones don't browse 'the' web 'just' fine—they browse 'a phone-optimised responsive' web 'reasonably' fine.

A fair comparison of cheap phones and a Raspberry Pi would be browsing the web with the "Desktop site" feature enabled in the phone browser.

I have a Moto G...something, at least five years old, sitting on my desk. It normally acts as a teleprompter. I opened up Chrome, turned on desktop site mode, and started browsing, and gotta be honest: it was fine. If nothing else, if absolutely nothing else, it could scroll a web page without stuttering, and a Raspberry Pi 4 has never been able to do that in any configuration I ever tested.

It's being reviewed on youtube positively in this regard. If you're reluctant, it wouldn't hurt to wait a few weeks and see what the reviewers who were not favored with prerelease hardware have to say about it.

You'd expect the experience to get better since people have been testing with prerelease software as well, but... we'll see.

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