Amazon: Samsung Pro Plus Micro SD 512GB - $34.99

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CRasch

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Sadly I just bought one. Looks like its direct from Amazon too, and not from some 3rd party store:

SAMSUNG PRO Plus microSD Memory Card + Adapter, 512GB MicroSDXC, Up to 180 MB/s, Full HD & 4K UHD, UHS-I, C10, U3, V30, A2 for Android Phones, Tablets, GoPRO, DJI Drone, MB-MD512SA/AM, 2023
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C1PRYPYX

Question is do you really need that much space for your rPi?
 
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DattoWattoz

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CRasch

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I just bought mine on the weekend at Best Buy (where they matched price when it was 44.99).
Hoping they will match it at the $34.99 price.
 
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Rain

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CRasch said:
Question is do you really need that much space for your rPi?
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I don't understand the desire/need to use large, non-endurance-rated MicroSD cards on SBCs. Smaller MicroSD cards for the OS and USB for storage makes more sense to me if you need more storage (especially as USB3 has become more common on SBCs). I'd imagine these high-capacity MicroSD cards are great for WORM data (a game library on a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, for example).

If you are looking for a great MicroSD card for SBC OS use (or any frequent-write scenario): I've had great experiences with Samsung Pro Endurance MicroSD cards as boot/OS media. They're not too fast and technically engineered for constant video recording applications (dash cams, ect) but they work great in general.

I've used Sandisk's high-endurance-rated SD and MicroSD cards too, but the Samsung cards are generally cheaper.
 
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Samir

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CRasch said:
I just bought mine on the weekend at Best Buy (where they matched price when it was 44.99).
Hoping they will match it at the $34.99 price.
Click to expand...
If I was going to get in on this deal, then I'd have BB price match it since there's not going to be any funny business with comingled inventory, fakes, or other amazon jungle nonsense. h2testw (or your favorite tester) is an imperative if you're getting one of these from amazon.
 
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USER189364

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tozmo said:
Would you be willing to tl;dr why you chose those?
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Basically, if you have a device that writes often to the card, and does not do so sequentially (such as a root device for a RasPi, or other higher intensity usecases) a card like the swissbit uses a better form of memory, called pSLC - this can withstand many more write/erase cycles compared to a normal bog standard consumer card, making it far more resilient for these types of operations. It still will not compare to any modern SSD, but is still significantly better than one of these consumer grade microSD cards.

Essentially, from my understanding, pSLC is essentially a slightly better form of MLC nand - it has less write/erase cycle lifetime than full SLC, but more than MLC. However, without the "smarts" of an SSD for dealing with trim, rotating block write locations, and cache, a Full SSD is always a better bet compared to any micro SD card.

A consumer SD card by contrast is usually designed for one of two usecases: either WORM style usage (Write data once, read many times) or, in the case of the endurance pro microSD cards, having better sequential write cycles/heat endurance for things like dashcams.

It all depends on the use case of the SD card.
 
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tinfoil3d

tinfoil3d

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swissbit and similar SLC/MLC-based manufacturers are really expensive but if you want it for your main/OS drive and it has to be small then yeah, that's the way to go.
I primarily use high-capacity as a WORM for backing up purposes as that takes drastically less space than LTO tapes or hard drives for that purpose.
 
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tinfoil3d

tinfoil3d

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I've had a lot of failures on consumer SD cards as well so basically never use them for anything valuable that's coming in a single copy! Take two different manufacturers/models and duplicate.
 
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Samir

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SLC ftw--only way to go for solid state storage if reliability is the most important feature.
 
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heromode

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i want hot-swap caddies/trays and backplanes for 2230/2242 M.2 drives to build a really tiny fileserver based on a SBC mobo and some really cute case.
 
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USER189364

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heromode said:
i want hot-swap caddies/trays and backplanes for 2230/2242 M.2 drives to build a really tiny fileserver based on a SBC mobo and some really cute case.
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That would be pretty cool. There was that RasPi compute blade server that made the rounds on youtube awhile back - something like that combined with a distributed backplane for m.2 drives (lets say 2 drives per SBC blade) and you could have a wicked hot swap server. especially if the blade connections both gave power and connected the drives.

Talk about a hefty endeavor though. a double sided backplane were one side took M.2, and the other was some type of custom connector; lets say pcie x8 bifurcated plus power and network.

each compute blade connected to two drives, and it had a built in power distribution and switch for interconnection.

I mean, the likelyhood of it being built? near nil, but it is fun to imagine new hardware concepts.
 
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heromode

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USER189364 said:
I mean, the likelyhood of it being built? near nil, but it is fun to imagine new hardware concepts.
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with these new upcoming 70+ TB SSD's, one could imagine a 10TB 2242 M.2 SSD as well.. 12 or 24 of those in a TMM sized case, in hot-swap caddies mounted horizontally at the front, just like a 2U rack mounted storage server.. would be cool.
 
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USER189364

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I think with a TMM type case, you would run into two main issues: heat and PCIe bandwidth. There are servers that can do that many lanes for sure, but I do not know of any ARM based ones that can, and nothing that also uses a ITX or even medium size mb - they all are pretty large server boards.

I guess it also matters how to distribute the lanes over the number of compute nodes you have, otherwise you would need some sort of management in between the nodes and the drives (similar to how the VRTX works)
 
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heromode

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sure, i'm only dreaming.. but for example a sbc board with 16x pcie5 lanes could theoretically be divided into 32x pcie4 lanes using a couple PLX chips and some multiplexing.. in the future
 
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j_h_o

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tozmo said:
Would you be willing to tl;dr why you chose those?
Click to expand...
Others have already said what I was going to say.

I'll just add: if I have an SBC like an rpi, I generally don't want to deal with an sdcard failure. If anyone is looking to use this sdcard as an OS drive, I just wanted to suggest that a Swissbit card (where I'm using the sdcard the way it was intended/designed for) is, for me., a far superior option. I have NO need for 512GB of storage, I just want my device to boot and always boot. I actually have 3 Samsung microsd cards that have failed, that I can't figure out how to RMA (because the serial number on them doesn't have the number of digits that the website insists should be on the card).

I picked Swissbit because I've used their flash memory elsewhere and it has been rock solid. No drama. Just works.

As an aside, I've also used Sandisk and Samsung cards in tablets for media storage, and they still fail there and I've kicked myself for being greedy, when the result was I couldn't watch Strange New Worlds on the plane because the card died ;)
 
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