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Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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