It’s actually one of the great features of the PI IMO, having the ability to quickly swap disks and reboot. Reminds me of the computers and video games of yesterday.
The SDCard solves this problem fairly well (although the solution requires a reasonable level of computer literacy due to the filesystems and raw block device access needed, however its a good fit for the Pi user demographic).
Other systems solve this chicken/egg problem by having a tool that runs on a PC that can perform the programming of attached storage, often by downloading code and data into a CPUs RAM and then having it flash to the disk. Exposing JTAG to Pi customers however is a step too far and would require more expensive external JTAG hardware to be needed per customer as well.
If I was Pi, I'd put a 10cent USB stick IC onto the board that connects in parallel to the eMMC and enable the board to be plugged into any USB host and mounted as external storage. Some programmable logic (get one of the Silego 10cent programmable logic ICs) would be needed to prevent the USB from being mounted when the system was running - I'd probably add in a button or switch that is read at power on and determines which interface gets to see the eMMC. It would need to hold either the Pi chip or the USB IC in reset depending on which function was selected.
A second option would be to put an USB eMMC protocol stack into the BootROM, but this would need LittleKernel or something similar in the BootROM and its non-trivial to get right!
I migrated a few years ago to the ASU’s Up! Board - same dimensions, GPIO, general layout as a Pi but with quad core atom, 32GB onboard storage, 4gb of ram and “proper” gigabit Ethernet. No more micro SD card failures (I’m aware usb and network boot exist for the Pi but does not fit my needs).
This Pi 4 ticks all of those boxes except for the storage. So close to a truly great little home server device.
Anyone comment on that?
Odroid has some eMMC performance numbers: https://magazine.odroid.com/article/orange-emmc-module-samsu...
Though on either board the fastest storage you'll get will likely be a USB3->SATA bridge with an SSD.
I'd recommend to settle for the lower performance unless you really really need it.
I've never seen it in use though!
64bit is the solution, pae was a huge hack when 64bit wasn't ready yet.
Haven't the RPi's all been ARM64 since the Pi 2?
All RPi3 models are ARMv8 (Cortex A53).
E.g. at around $100 or $200?
6-core, 64-bit, 4GB ram, EMMC, GbE, Wifi5 (AC), HDMI 2.0 (4k), USB3
Best software besides Rasberry I've seen is from these guys. Great build quality too.
1: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...
If you're looking for just a small computer, the Intel NUC is a good place to start.
Also, a refurb Asus Chromebox would be around $150 if you want x86.
Do you have any tips?