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Comment by maguirre | Hacker News Reader

It's about time they put some FLASH on-board. SD card has proven time and time again an unreliable medium. You never know if the device would boot up after a "dirty shutdown"

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Personally, I liked the SD Card method. It allowed me to keep a few cards with different OS images on them, and quickly swap them out when I wanted to change what the device was used for.

It might be a bit more difficult with the built in storage, but I suppose it's nothing that can't be managed.

Yes but say I need to run a rails application with a DB on a Lan (less than 15 users), perfomance is not an issue (nginx + postgresql + puma uses less than 115 MB of RAM!) The only thing stopping you is SDCard's reliability!

A friend of mine had two unrecoverably broken Kingston class 10 SDCards on the same RPi in 6 months. Bad luck maybe, but still I'd love to have something more solid to run applications without fear of data loss.

You can setup the SD card to run read only, and use a external usb hard drive when you need to write.

Correct me if I am wrong but it is my understanding that you can still have read problems on an RO SD card. In fact I was recently reading a Micron Application note that explained that the mere act of reading it could cause bit-flips.

Do you have a link to that?

Isn't the eMMC card basically an "SD" card as a chip? Thus this machine should having the same problems with unreliable shutdown and wear-leveling as the normal Pi, with the added culprit that you cannot swap the card for a new one.

A lot of the unreliability comes from the connector, and a lot more comes from crappy counterfeit SD cards.

If you still want an SD card (I don't -- network and USB are so much faster), I expect you could buy an IO board with one or more. I don't see one on the Pi Foundation's board right now but it should be easy to add.

My understanding is eMMC flash memory is an SD card soldered onto a board, so if anything that problem could be worse without the advantage of a removable card

It's very similar but often faster. The Odroid U2 uses removable EMMC storage which has an SD card adaptor, which I feel is a very good middle ground (most of the advantages of both with the disadvantage that the connector on the board is non-standard).

SD cards have different classes- without seeing specs, I'd be willing to bet that a Class 10 SDhc card is on par with this EMMC storage.

Correct, plus the cheap SD connectors are a source of a lot of noise and unreliability. Just doing away with them will be a huge benefit.

You are correct. I jumped the gun. This in fact will probably be worse that having a removable SD card.

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