pcie nvme ssd on raspberry pi?

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, steelo said:

That is very true, if I'm not mistaken, a rpi4 is about as powerful as a midrange smartphone. However, the hardware is by no means meant for high performance.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has four A53 cores.

So performance wise it's about as powerful as the Moto E LTE (second gen) or the Moto G (third gen).

 

So the Raspberry Pi 4 is actually as powerful as a low end (sub 200 dollar) phone from 2015. 

Even a modern low end smartphone in power savings mode can run circles around the Raspberry Pi 4.

 

That doesn't mean the Raspberry Pi is slow though. What I am trying to say is that modern smartphones, even low end ones, has a truckload of processing power. I'd say even the Raspberry Pi 4 is quite powerful. CPU-wise it probably stacks up against a fairly high end PC from the early 2000's.

If technology keep progressing at this rate then we will have a 35 dollar Raspberry Pi in 2040 that will outperform a 2000 dollar Threadripper bought today.

[mahyar]

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The Raspberry Pi 4 has four A53 cores.

So performance wise it's about as powerful as the Moto E LTE (second gen) or the Moto G (third gen).

 

So the Raspberry Pi 4 is actually as powerful as a low end (sub 200 dollar) phone from 2015. 

Even a modern low end smartphone in power savings mode can run circles around the Raspberry Pi 4.

 

That doesn't mean the Raspberry Pi is slow though. What I am trying to say is that modern smartphones, even low end ones, has a truckload of processing power. I'd say even the Raspberry Pi 4 is quite powerful. CPU-wise it probably stacks up against a fairly high end PC from the early 2000's.

If technology keep progressing at this rate then we will have a 35 dollar Raspberry Pi in 2040 that will outperform a 2000 dollar Threadripper bought today.

well cpu in rpi is picked very carefully for availability and cost so if they want they can build a powerful af raspberry pi today but they wont

[Kisai]

6 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

Well what’s the best usage for Raspberry Pi clusters besides education ( and learning ) ?

Nothing. At least nothing that doesn't justify running it on something specialized that has compute capability. Like a nVidia Xavier devkit is $800 and 30w, vs a cluster of pi's needed in the same power envelope is 8.

 

The Pi's only practical use outside of "look I can run linux poorly on it" are for robotics uses, and even then, the compute capability is lacklustre.

 

However you also have to consider the main problem with using other solutions like the nVidia parts, because to get GPU compute performance on the nvidia part, you have to use ONLY the nvidia libraries provided by nVidia, and only those versions. So if that's not a match for what you're doing, then you're only going to get cpu compute on it too.

 

CPU compute however is a poor, inefficient use for these Pi's. At best it's a learning tool, but it doesn't have a lot of transference to any platform with a GPU, and the software libraries will be different or broken entirely between versions.

 

For the amount of effort needed to get things to work on the Pi, you could probably buy something else that already works out of the box. One of the on-going jokes among computer nerds is "building a beowolf cluster of X device" which is how a cluster of PS3's wound up being cheaper than a supercomputer build.

 

But you're not going to build a super computer with Pi's.

 

[steelo]

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Nothing. At least nothing that doesn't justify running it on something specialized that has compute capability. Like a nVidia Xavier devkit is $800 and 30w, vs a cluster of pi's needed in the same power envelope is 8.

 

The Pi's only practical use outside of "look I can run linux poorly on it" are for robotics uses, and even then, the compute capability is lacklustre.

 

However you also have to consider the main problem with using other solutions like the nVidia parts, because to get GPU compute performance on the nvidia part, you have to use ONLY the nvidia libraries provided by nVidia, and only those versions. So if that's not a match for what you're doing, then you're only going to get cpu compute on it too.

 

CPU compute however is a poor, inefficient use for these Pi's. At best it's a learning tool, but it doesn't have a lot of transference to any platform with a GPU, and the software libraries will be different or broken entirely between versions.

 

For the amount of effort needed to get things to work on the Pi, you could probably buy something else that already works out of the box. One of the on-going jokes among computer nerds is "building a beowolf cluster of X device" which is how a cluster of PS3's wound up being cheaper than a supercomputer build.

 

But you're not going to build a super computer with Pi's.

 

I think you're entirely missing the point of rpis...

 

They are a cheap solution (mainly for kids) to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. Not everybody can afford a $400-$500 PC, yet they can pick up one of these for as little as $5-$10 USD. This also is a viable solution for people of poorer nations to have a sort of 'desktop pc' for basic tasks, such as email, web surfing and word processing.

 

rpi's were never intended to compete with high end smartphones or pc's. They are a cost effective (and just powerful enough) solution to those wanting to explore computing.

[LAwLz]

24 minutes ago, steelo said:

rpi's were never intended to compete with high end smartphones or pc's. They are a cost effective (and just powerful enough) solution to those wanting to explore computing.

I also think they are great for hobby stuff or simple clients.

One of my clients use them for powering screens in a production facility. They have a bunch of screens everywhere in the facility with Raspberry Pis connected to them, displaying a web page showing things like orders and if they are on schedule or not.

 

I use a Raspberry Pi at home for emulation of some older consoles. Way better to use a Raspberry Pi than can emulate all my consoles rather than try and connect ~30 year old consoles with a billion adapters to my modern TV.

Raspberry Pi's are great for hosting simple servers at home as well. A personal website, DNS server (like Pi-Hole), mail server, print server, syslog server. Stuff like that.

The Raspberry Pi is great for all of those kinds of things.

[steelo]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I also think they are great for hobby stuff or simple clients.

One of my clients use them for powering screens in a production facility. They have a bunch of screens everywhere in the facility with Raspberry Pis connected to them, displaying a web page showing things like orders and if they are on schedule or not.

 

I use a Raspberry Pi at home for emulation of some older consoles. Way better to use a Raspberry Pi than can emulate all my consoles rather than try and connect ~30 year old consoles with a billion adapters to my modern TV.

Raspberry Pi's are great for hosting simple servers at home as well. A personal website, DNS server (like Pi-Hole), mail server, print server, syslog server. Stuff like that.

The Raspberry Pi is great for all of those kinds of things.

I have a rpi3 I use for learning python and 2 rpi 0's for security cameras. They run 24/7 and probably use less power per month than my desktop pc I run an hour or so a day.

[mahyar]

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I also think they are great for hobby stuff or simple clients.

One of my clients use them for powering screens in a production facility. They have a bunch of screens everywhere in the facility with Raspberry Pis connected to them, displaying a web page showing things like orders and if they are on schedule or not.

 

I use a Raspberry Pi at home for emulation of some older consoles. Way better to use a Raspberry Pi than can emulate all my consoles rather than try and connect ~30 year old consoles with a billion adapters to my modern TV.

Raspberry Pi's are great for hosting simple servers at home as well. A personal website, DNS server (like Pi-Hole), mail server, print server, syslog server. Stuff like that.

The Raspberry Pi is great for all of those kinds of things.

 

1 minute ago, steelo said:

I have a rpi3 I use for learning python and 2 rpi 0's for security cameras. They run 24/7 and probably use less power per month than my desktop pc I run an hour or so a day.

i made a drone with pi zero

[steelo]

1 hour ago, mahyar said:

 

i made a drone with pi zero

I seriously have thought about doing this, but feared it was beyond my skill level. So far, I've made a few applications in python but I'm not very good with my coding yet...one being a 'stranger things' project that turns on bulbs corresponding to letters to 'spell' out a message, a 'space wars' game and my favorite, an application written with Tkinter that sends me text messages the day before to remind me of an appointment, etc. I've also used it for Christmas light shows with music. I also have a rpi0 webcam server that streams to an old ipad so I can watch the front door while I'm working in my office 

 

 

I was for a while trying to write a 'laser writer' that 'draws' images from a laser pointer onto a glow in the dark backboard based on simple images it imports. It's quite basic, it looks for the first pixel and then checks up, down, left, right and diagonally to see if there is a neighboring pixel and then instructs the pointer to move that direction. It works using the turtle function to test it, as long as the image is VERY basic and there are no 'intersections' on the image. So far, I've successfully drawn a heart, a circle and a Christmas tree...LOL. It does have problems as I can't seem to get opencv to run on the rpi3. So, I have to convert the image to an array of movements on my pc, then import it to my rpi3. I haven't had a chance to test it out with the stepper motors, but in theory it should (work).

[Kilrah]

3 hours ago, mahyar said:

webserver hosting

Very much not, again if you want to learn how to host websites on a cluster with load balancing etc yes, but actually hosting production websites on a pi cluster instead of a decent PC is only making your life a pain.

[mahyar]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Very much not, again if you want to learn how to host websites on a cluster with load balancing etc yes, but actually hosting production websites on a pi cluster instead of a decent PC is only making your life a pain.

well i hosted a website on a pi cluster it was not painful at all and it was a very fun project

[steelo]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Very much not, again if you want to learn how to host websites on a cluster with load balancing etc yes, but actually hosting production websites on a pi cluster instead of a decent PC is only making your life a pain.

Right nobody in their right mind would use a rpi to host a production website. It would be fine though to host a simple website with the owner being the only user. There could be a lot of uses for this...home security and monitoring being one of them.

[ScratchCat]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The Raspberry Pi 4 has four A53 cores.

So performance wise it's about as powerful as the Moto E LTE (second gen) or the Moto G (third gen).

The Raspberry Pi 4 uses A72 cores with benchmarks putting it at about twice the performance of the 3B+ (including the 1.5GHz vs 1.3GHz difference in clockspeed).

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Nothing. At least nothing that doesn't justify running it on something specialized that has compute capability. Like a nVidia Xavier devkit is $800 and 30w, vs a cluster of pi's needed in the same power envelope is 8.

 

The Pi's only practical use outside of "look I can run linux poorly on it" are for robotics uses, and even then, the compute capability is lacklustre.

For tasks which aren't CPU bound the Pi does quite well. Now that the Pi 4 offers gigabit ethernet and USB 3 you set up a fairly decent file server which only consumes 5W (excluding drives). Even the original Pi which uses the same CPU as the original iPhone does well as a PiHole.

 

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

Very much not, again if you want to learn how to host websites on a cluster with load balancing etc yes, but actually hosting production websites on a pi cluster instead of a decent PC is only making your life a pain.

The Raspberry Pi launch site was hosted on Raspberry Pis. At the end of the day a Pi is just another (slower, ECC-less) computer.

Quote

Is it any good?

Yes. Raspberry Pi is twice as fast as the same-sized instances in AWS, for a quarter of the price.

 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, steelo said:

I think you're entirely missing the point of rpis...

 

They are a cheap solution (mainly for kids) to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. Not everybody can afford a $400-$500 PC, yet they can pick up one of these for as little as $5-$10 USD. This also is a viable solution for people of poorer nations to have a sort of 'desktop pc' for basic tasks, such as email, web surfing and word processing.

 

rpi's were never intended to compete with high end smartphones or pc's. They are a cost effective (and just powerful enough) solution to those wanting to explore computing.

No, I didn't miss the point. The OP basically presented a "compute" solution and the RPi's are not a compute solution. There is simply a compute form factor designed for robotics, rather than a poor-man's desktop. This unfortunately oversells the capability of the RPi.

 

RPi's are basically toys, and are priced like such.

 

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Very much not, again if you want to learn how to host websites on a cluster with load balancing etc yes, but actually hosting production websites on a pi cluster instead of a decent PC is only making your life a pain.

It's good enough to run home automation, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it for for anything that needs reliability. Again, an RPi is a toy, and just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

 

Years ago, someone got the brilliant idea to do a colocation service using must macmini's, you buy the macmini yourself. https://www.macminicolo.net/

 

This is very much the same idea from the other side. This is re-purposing the "toy" apple product as a cloud server. Because they take up less space than a 1U server. But they're nowhere near the capability of a typical Xeon from the same cpu family. A Macmini is essentially a headless laptop which runs maybe 35w tops, and you can fit three side-by-side in, and server that fits the same space consumes 80w per cpu. So 105w vs 160w. But no power supply redundancy or network redundancy. It's pretty cheap, relatively speaking. Capability wise, a macmini is also not powerful enough to run a typical website today. It's fine to tinker on, but you're better off using it as remote storage than anything else.

 

To which, comes back to the problem with using underpowered devices. They are typically not designed to be used in the ways people want to use them, because people see them as "a cheap alternative" rather than using the devices for their capabilities. So an RPi is essentially designed to play movies using it's hardware decoders, so the main thing's it would be a good target for streaming endpoints. Think thin-client, not server.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

The Raspberry Pi 4 uses A72 cores with benchmarks putting it at about twice the performance of the 3B+ (including the 1.5GHz vs 1.3GHz difference in clockspeed).

Oops you're right. That makes it way faster. 

[mahyar]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

No, I didn't miss the point. The OP basically presented a "compute" solution and the RPi's are not a compute solution. There is simply a compute form factor designed for robotics, rather than a poor-man's desktop. This unfortunately oversells the capability of the RPi.

 

RPi's are basically toys, and are priced like such.

no even if they are "toys" there is some power to them an they can be used as a compute solution im saying this as a person who did this 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, mahyar said:

no even if they are "toys" there is some power to them an they can be used as a compute solution im saying this as a person who did this 

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?variant=raspberry-pi-cm4001000

 

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf

 

Quote

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) is a System on Module (SoM) containing processor, memory, eMMC Flash and supporting power circuitry. These modules allow a designer to leverage the Raspberry Pi hardware and software stack in their own custom systems and form factors. In addition these modules have extra IO interfaces over and above what is available on the Raspberry Pi boards, opening up more options for the designer.

 

The design of the CM4 is loosely based on the Raspberry Pi 4, Model B, and for cost sensitive applications it can be supplied without the eMMC fitted; this version is called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Lite (CM4Lite).

 

While previous generations of the Compute Module have all shared the same DDR2-SODIMM-mechanically-compatible form factor, the new CM4 and CM4Lite are different. The electrical interface of the CM4 is via two 100-pin high density connectors, and the new physical form factor has a smaller footprint overall when the connectors are taken into account.

They are designed explicitly for embedded device otherwise they would be designed with M2 NVMe slots, not eMMC. As it is, there is only one PCIe 2.0x1 lane on it, which means that any NVMe connected to it operates at a speed that is no faster than a SATA drive. That's 5x faster than the 100MB/sec eMMC, but pretty much pointless since NVMe drives only come in x2 and x4.

 

Honestly, RPi should be revised to just natively support twin M2 slots, one A+E for the WiFi and one B+M for SSD. But hey the chip doesn't support PCIe 3.0, let alone 4.0, let alone 2 lanes, never mind 4 lanes. So you're overpaying for a SSD that can only be used at most 25% of it's performance. 

 

I'm not pooh-pooh'ing your effort here, but this is really the wrong device to apply it to. You would have more use of the USB 3.0 port.

 

 

 

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

They are designed explicitly for embedded device otherwise they would be designed with M2 NVMe slots, not eMMC. As it is, there is only one PCIe 2.0x1 lane on it, which means that any NVMe connected to it operates at a speed that is no faster than a SATA drive

I was just arguing with my Strayan buddy about this. The PCIe-bus on the Pi4 is only 5Gbps, which is actually slower than SATA III at 6Gbps, but he insists it's plenty for making a 10-drive NAS out of the Pi. That's just....no. As the engineers themselves say, they get around 390MB/s speeds over the PCIe-bus in actual practice, which can be saturated with a single SATA SSD or two modern HDDs.

 

EDIT: To amend what I said above (not specifically aimed at you, Kisai, and more as an explanation to everyone else about my comment), the Pi would technically be plenty fine as a NAS for a whole bunch of drives depending on the configuration one uses. With bulk-storage or RAID0, the gigabit Ethernet would be the primary bottleneck and so you could slap an enormous bunch of drives on it, if you liked.

 

With RAID1...well, each write over the network is written to all the drives, so if you were writing at 110MB/s over the network and thus, with a 3-drive RAID1, you'd be writing 330MB/s combined to the drives and you'd be close to shifting the bottleneck from the Ethernet to the PCIe-bus. With 4 drives, you'd need 440MB/s, but don't have that, so you'd instead bottleneck the Ethernet to 97.5MB/s.

 

All the RAID-levels above 0 have a chokepoint like this, where the PCIe-bus would no longer be enough.

[mahyar]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?variant=raspberry-pi-cm4001000

 

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf

there are a ton of devices that are not used in their intended use case

[Kroon]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

RPi's are basically toys, and are priced like such.

 

Actually they are not well priced.

 

For playing around and home automation projects things like ESP or Arduino are better suited, easier to program/understad and cheaper. 

 

RPi are more of an novelty thing that lives on thanks to its comunity and a lot of PR work.  Do like what RPI Foundations are doing and I would love more engagement in project like that.

[mahyar]

9 minutes ago, Kroon said:

 

Actually they are not well priced.

 

For playing around and home automation projects things like ESP or Arduino are better suited, easier to program/understad and cheaper. 

 

RPi are more of an novelty thing that lives on thanks to its comunity and a lot of PR work.  Do like what RPI Foundations are doing and I would love more engagement in project like that.

i work with arduino and esp stuff a lot some of computanally heavier stuff will be a lot better on PIs

[Kroon]

2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

i work with arduino and esp stuff a lot some of computanally heavier stuff will be a lot better on PIs

 

That is correct but how often do you need computation in home automation?  ESP32 is power enough to drive a touchscreen and smal web server at the same time. Automation is not about having the most computing power, it's about having just enough.

[mahyar]

2 minutes ago, Kroon said:

 

That is correct but how often do you need computation in home automation?  ESP32 is power enough to drive a touchscreen and smal web server at the same time. Automation is not about having the most computing power, it's about having just enough.

trust me more than you think can you docker on a esp?

[steelo]

18 hours ago, Kisai said:

No, I didn't miss the point. The OP basically presented a "compute" solution and the RPi's are not a compute solution. There is simply a compute form factor designed for robotics, rather than a poor-man's desktop. This unfortunately oversells the capability of the RPi.

 

RPi's are basically toys, and are priced like such.

 

It's good enough to run home automation, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it for for anything that needs reliability. Again, an RPi is a toy, and just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

 

Years ago, someone got the brilliant idea to do a colocation service using must macmini's, you buy the macmini yourself. https://www.macminicolo.net/

 

This is very much the same idea from the other side. This is re-purposing the "toy" apple product as a cloud server. Because they take up less space than a 1U server. But they're nowhere near the capability of a typical Xeon from the same cpu family. A Macmini is essentially a headless laptop which runs maybe 35w tops, and you can fit three side-by-side in, and server that fits the same space consumes 80w per cpu. So 105w vs 160w. But no power supply redundancy or network redundancy. It's pretty cheap, relatively speaking. Capability wise, a macmini is also not powerful enough to run a typical website today. It's fine to tinker on, but you're better off using it as remote storage than anything else.

 

To which, comes back to the problem with using underpowered devices. They are typically not designed to be used in the ways people want to use them, because people see them as "a cheap alternative" rather than using the devices for their capabilities. So an RPi is essentially designed to play movies using it's hardware decoders, so the main thing's it would be a good target for streaming endpoints. Think thin-client, not server.

I guess it depends on ones definition of 'toy' You might say that a pencil and paper are 'outdated' and useless today, since we now have tablets, phones and PC's. Relative to modern day PC's, rpi's are 'underpowered' However, when you use them for their intended purpose, which is to learn or run 'lightweight' applications, such as webcam servers using next to no electricity...they serve their intended purpose. There aren't many other options for single board computers with GPIO outputs that are the size of a credit card, cost as little as $5-$10 and use 240mW of electricity. If you expect to be able to use a pi0 as a desktop computer, you'll be sorely disappointed. However, they are great tools to learn python, emulate games, use as webcam servers and adblockers, as well as a multitude of other projects.

 

The OP was more in reference to whether or not it could be done (at least that's how I interpreted it) Yes, it can...will it be as efficient and powerful as using modern day PC's with i9's and dedicated GPU's...absolutely not.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, steelo said:

I guess it depends on ones definition of 'toy' You might say that a pencil and paper are 'outdated' and useless today, since we now have tablets, phones and PC's. 

A "toy" is something that serves to educate or entertain. Other general purpose tools are cheaper for the use case, or there are better tools specialized for the use case. 

 

You can build a PC chassis from Lego (toys) or wood, glass, or 3D print one, but none of these materials are actually appropriate for a a complete PC chassis, yet you can.

- Lego is probably too expensive, and not thermally stable enough to use

- Wood is probably cheaper than a typical case, but the tools needed to carve one aren't things people typically have

- Glass requires tools and skill make by yourself, and most people don't have these tools or skills.

- 3D printing requires tools and perhaps skill.

 

Most people would buy a pre-made chassis, and just customize the case (eg powdercoat or painting a metal chassis) if they didn't like the color it came in.

 

The RPi has always been a more general-purpose toy than a tool, as you will typically find people use them for things that they're not well suited for.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/different-uses-raspberry-pi/

 

 

Like the three repeated ideas there are either using it as a general purpose computer, or using it as a camera/video recorder. There are better tools for doing this, clearly. So you have to think beyond "make something that already exists".

 

[mahyar]

57 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A "toy" is something that serves to educate or entertain. Other general purpose tools are cheaper for the use case, or there are better tools specialized for the use case. 

 

You can build a PC chassis from Lego (toys) or wood, glass, or 3D print one, but none of these materials are actually appropriate for a a complete PC chassis, yet you can.

- Lego is probably too expensive, and not thermally stable enough to use

- Wood is probably cheaper than a typical case, but the tools needed to carve one aren't things people typically have

- Glass requires tools and skill make by yourself, and most people don't have these tools or skills.

- 3D printing requires tools and perhaps skill.

 

Most people would buy a pre-made chassis, and just customize the case (eg powdercoat or painting a metal chassis) if they didn't like the color it came in.

 

The RPi has always been a more general-purpose toy than a tool, as you will typically find people use them for things that they're not well suited for.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/different-uses-raspberry-pi/

 

 

Like the three repeated ideas there are either using it as a general purpose computer, or using it as a camera/video recorder. There are better tools for doing this, clearly. So you have to think beyond "make something that already exists".

 

well RPI is a toy but there is a lot more to it rpi for with a bit of oveclock can easily be used as a office pc