Raspberry Pi 5 Gets a MicroSD Express Hat

Whilst the headlined article is interesting, it's a case of the new and shiny distracting from regressions in what already exists.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is lacking in some fairly basic support that the Pi 4 has. There's no TianoCore, no NetBSD, no FreeBSD, no OpenBSD, no OmniOS(CE) … in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS. A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.

* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...

* https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/#index6h2

* https://www.freebsd.org/where/#download

* https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

* https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/

So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.

Raspberry Pi gets a lot of negative comments these days, with unfavorable comparisons to mini PCs at similar price points, which is certainly justified. But I don't know, it's not completely rational, I still love my Raspberry Pis. Especially a Pi 5 with an NVME SSD is a beast in terms of performance. They use very little power, they are tiny, the programmable GPIO pins are awesome. There's still a sense of magic, which for hobby use, is more important than the raw numbers. I just don't get the same "sense of tinkering" when booting a PC.

Bit of a “why does this exist” product to me.

If you’re going to use pcie lanes anyway then stick a m.2 at the end of it to benefit from mass scale of nvme drive production.

I also have a general distrust of sd cards and their write levelling. Maybe just rotten luck or fake ones but they never seem to last

I lost interest in getting Pi when I realized a mini PC is about the same price and will have specs that are about the same or a little better.

I would avoid using SD cards and go for something else like M.2 or NVMe for storage. SD cards tend to be on the lesser side in terms of performance, failure rate, and silicon quality in general.

The Raspberry Pi 5 should have a m.2 slot by default. Even if it's one of those short ones to maintain form factor.

Imagine you’d like to experiment with a remotely accessible webcam - for instance, streaming over RTSP - without necessarily running YOLO or other detection models on the device itself.

Which board-and-camera combination would you choose?

If MicroSD Express adds direct PCIe support in that tiny, uncooled form factor, it would be nice to see some actual benchmarks with that Hat due to throttling.

As someone who runs a business that sells thousands of Raspberry Pis, the idea of encouraging more users to store data on microSD cards is quite concerning to me.

The introduction of the m.2 HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 has been a game changer, not just in terms of speed, but also in significantly improving disk/filesystem reliability.

I guess all I'm saying is, for the love of God, if you've got a choice and need to store data on a Pi5, please use the m.2 HAT + SSD from Raspberry Pi. Unlike other fruit companies, the prices for the SSDs are quite reasonable.

Sadly you can't really buy the cards for love or money right now.