James R. Strickland's Blog

Notes on the Raspberry Pi 4b

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4/4GiB.  Below and in the comments are my notes from poking at it.

SSDs are now worth it. My ancient Apple laptop HDD got about 33MB/Sec for both buffered and direct access. My inexpensive (Inland) SSD got about 108MB/sec direct, and 198 MB/sec buffered.
On my big desktop Linux machine with the same $5(US) USB3-SATA interface, I got virtually the same numbers from the Ancient Apple HDD, a bit over 200MB/Sec buffered and  about 200MB/Sec unbuffered on the SSD.

The Pi's USB 3 interface isn't as fast as the one on my big Linux box. I know this. It's been publicly stated. It's still plenty fast. As I do not have a 7200 RPM notebook drive to test with, I'll just say that based on the specs, you //might// touch somewhere close to these numbers with a high performance HDD on a Pi, and if the budget is pinching, or you happen to have a 7200RPM notebook drive lying about, you won't do badly with it, but my experience has been that you will feel the difference with the SSD. Particularly with the Pi, where swapping is a way of life, I recommend the SSD.

Numbers generated using hdparm -t /dev/sda and hdparm -t --direct /dev/sda.