Beginners • Re: These nvme base hats look interesting but do not have access to them, perhaps someone here can answer a question I h

Would probably try running as Boot in Raid0 (recently got burned with the brand new SD Micro dying on pi5 after less than 6mo (I know probably SD DOA fault)... first one in nearly 5 years).

Reading this it looks like you want redundancy, but RAID0 is not for redundancy but for speed. If 1 disk dies, your whole filesystem is gone. And as NVMEs are usually much faster than the single Pi5 PCIEv2 lane, it is a fairly useless option.

For my money, RAID0 is pretty much pointless on anything other than spinning rust (because those have latency from head movement and platter rotation that is not present in flash drives) and far to risky to use even then.

Maybe you mean RAID1,

Maybe they do but any RAID level* done in software is going to kill write pefrormance. Because there is no RAID capable controller on the "HAT" the OS has to send the data to each drive individually. And, for some RAID levels, also calculate parity data.

but then still: boot and root do not need TeraBytes of space, boot essentially a few megabyte, root 30G or so. You should create extra partitions for data or home, but I know many people just 'burn' an image, at first boot it eats/claims the whole thing so Pi+storage industry keeps people on a leash.

Nobody is keeping anybody on a leash though it may appear that way to you. And I very much doubt that there is any collusion between RPL and the "storage industry". Things work the way they do because the aim was to make it as easy as possible for people (especially kids) to get going with what is likely to be their first Linux computer. Possibly even the first compuer they have used that didn't come with the OS pre-installed.

I also strongly disagree with your advice to create additional partitions. Yes, It's possible but for a beginner it's non-trivial. More importantly, because of the way an OS is installed or replaced on a Pi (and because of the way most of the available copy OS to a different drive tools work) it's far to easy to lose youir data when replacing your OS. Writing an OS image or using SD card Copier (to name the official tool) will nuke everything on the target device not just the boot and root partitions. And because of built in wear leveling it might not be easy to recover it.

But, hey. You do it your way and I'll do it mine.

*: Except for RAID0 which only writes to one drive at a time but that's misnamed as there's no Redundency built in to it.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sat Sep 28, 2024 12:18 am

---