Re: [epp-dev] EPP 2020-12 RC2

[Liviu Ionescu <ilg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On 12 Dec 2020, at 01:04, Nitin Dahyabhai <thatnitind@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I threw Fedora Workstation 33 onto a pi4 (well, a microSD card) and tried it

(I apologise for being off-topic with this message, but perhaps it can save some time to those interested)

Although functional, a RPi with a microSD card is generally too slow for anything practical.

The RPi SD interface is limited to 50 MB/s. Even so, you need a fast card able to write at 50 MB/s to fill the bandwidth. Cards up to 32 GB generally do not meet this requirement. After testing several, I found out that Samsung 64 EVO Plus is one of the reasonably fast ones.

However, this is still slow. A better solution is a USB SSD. The RPI USB 3 interface is limited to about 300 MB/s. Thus, an average SSD that is advertised at 500 MB/s write speed should be enough. Samsung T5 for example seems to be a good fit. Personally I have a SanDisk Portable, because I consider the Samsung SSDs a marketing trick, since they advertise a high speed, but if the temperature rises, the drives throttle down, and sometimes this is dramatic. SanDisk SSDs behave better with temperature, do not get as hot as Samsungs, and are better at sustaining the transfer rates.


So, for those who want to play with Raspberry Pis, the recommended configuration is

- a RPi with 8 GB ram
- a good heatsink (https://youtu.be/VJC6OpGpq0Y?t=751)
- a Samsung T5 USB SSD or a Sandisk Extreme® Portable USB 3.1 SSD


Hope that helps,

Liviu