[HN Gopher] Results of 500 MicroSD Benchmarks on SBCs
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Results of 500 MicroSD Benchmarks on SBCs
Author : bmlw
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-03-21 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bret.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bret.dk)
| walrus01 wrote:
| I am far less concerned about read/write speeds than I am about
| write endurance and overall reliability/lifespan of microSD cards
| in raspberry pi 3/4.
|
| Would be interesting to see a write torture test until failure
| comparing the samsung "PRO ENDURANCE" microsd cards to regular
| u1/u3 class cards.
| bmlw wrote:
| Hi! I'm the guy that tested these and I hear you, as I
| mentioned at the bottom of the post, I'm currently working on
| stress testing some of the cards through a series of sequential
| read/write and random IO tests and as soon as I have enough
| data to justify the post, I shall be putting it up. I don't
| have a Samsung endurance card, though I'm testing a SanDisk MAX
| ENDURANCE card in this round.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm very interested in seeing how that SanDisk fares. Been
| thinking about getting it.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Save yourself the headache and switch to USB booting to a
| proper SSD. Don't try to get maximum lifetime or endurance from
| dirt cheap micro SD cards.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't know if its true or not... but I feel like I lose data
| when I leave my phone in the car.
|
| Temperature-changes almost certainly changes the physics of the
| microsd cards. I feel like what's reliable at room-temperature
| (70F) may not be reliable at 32F or 140F.
|
| Then again, Rasp. Pi setups probably don't care about
| temperature. But I can imagine cameras, phones, etc. etc. that
| are left in a car in a wide variety of temperatures who may
| care.
| m463 wrote:
| yes, there was only 1 samsung card tested - they should test
| more. Basically ALL my SD cards are different flavors of
| samsung.
| bigiain wrote:
| > they should test more. Basically ALL my SD cards are
| different flavors of samsung
|
| I'm looking forward to your blog post with similarly detailed
| results for your collection of Samsung cards.
|
| (Or your offer of decent contracting rates so "they" can do
| that for you.)
| icameron wrote:
| This is a good point, but there is a larger problem anytime you
| are relying on SD cards for a R/W root partition. Especially
| when making a product out of one of these boards. It's so easy
| to follow a tutorial and start an idea from a Bone or Pi or
| whatever and have some cool functionality and think it's ready
| to sell. Unfortunately, many of these boards don't have on
| board flash and by default are booting from SD card with a
| Linux distribution. It will fail a lot more than a real hard
| drive does. A cheap SD card is not the same as an SSD when you
| get down to it, no way around it. Absolutely use the SD card to
| log data, but don't make booting dependent on cheap removable
| flash media. Choose an SBC that has high quality flash with
| good EEC. Source: Experience datalogging with SBCs for 3
| companies for 10 years of my career.
| koz1000 wrote:
| I'm curious about the quality of the uSD card holders on all
| of these units. Do they all use quality non-corrosive fingers
| with enough force on the contacts?
|
| I once had an intern that told me all about his RPi project
| to do model rocket telemetry, then after some interrogation
| sheepishly admitted that the project never quite worked
| because the g forces and vibration at launch were enough to
| make the card holder lose contact and the kernel panicked.
| Bummer.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Two easy ways to mitigate this:
|
| * run alpine in diskless mode, this way all writes are very
| deliberate and you never have something like a journal eat
| though your entire card
|
| * use the SD card to boot EDK2 UEFI firmware, and enjoy booting
| generic ARM images from USB
| masyukun wrote:
| This is great data! I sliced it 2 different ways in Google Sheets
| -- by SD card and by Raspberry Pi board.
|
| Agreed that Amazon Basics is the surprising front-runner for the
| cards, although the IOPing results are shockingly bad for most
| cards except SanDisk Ultra 16 + 32. Might need to use Analytical
| Hierarchy Process to determine how each performance
| characteristic should be weighted.
|
| For boards, the top 3 in your tests by a wide margin are: 1)
| Orange Pi i96, 2) BeagleBone Black (2GB eMMC), 3) Raspberry Pi 4
| Model B (Revision 1.1 - 2GB)
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ENHM6N38iHFd7dEYliaT...
| cyounkins wrote:
| Here's a massive dataset: https://pibenchmarks.com/
| m463 wrote:
| That's an odd database for SD cards. A lot of the images do not
| match the SD card description (in size).
| kup0 wrote:
| I know USB booting on pi is still not perfect, but it almost
| seems to make more sense at this point to boot off of a decent
| USB flash drive, I would think? If you get a decent brand with
| good benchmarks, I would think that reads/writes would blow all
| SD cards away. What I'm not sure about is latency or lifespan,
| though I would think _good_ USB flash drives are likely to be
| better quality flash than SD, without really being significantly
| costly in comparison?
|
| I say this as someone that uses SD cards currently, and I
| understand if others do also- it's the easiest/default option,
| but I've definitely given thought to switching
| dsr_ wrote:
| I have to wonder how lucky the Amazon card is: is the
| manufacturer consistent, or is it just a rebrand of whoever has
| made them a deal this quarter? Or several rebrands?
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder the same thing.
|
| I had a Kingston SATA SSD that failed. It didn't just become
| read-only, it failed completely and catastrophically. One day
| everything was there, the next day the drive couldn't access
| anything.
|
| I delved deeper after that and now stick to major
| manufacturers.
| bmlw wrote:
| This is actually part of my worry too and I bought 2 units (of
| the 2x64GB) from the UK and Swedish sites and both are showing
| up as the same manufacturer etc. Would definitely like to hear
| from others that have them though to see how consistent things
| are over in North America.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| My understanding is that the SD card standard is often the
| bottleneck here. It would be nice if devices (like the Pi) could
| move to the faster UFS standard.
| [deleted]
| dtx1 wrote:
| I'm suprised by the strong results of the amazon basic cards,
| though what is missing from this dataset is the "how fast does it
| die" measurement
| bmlw wrote:
| I started that testing around a week ago! Will hopefully have
| enough data for a post in the coming weeks but it's a bit
| easier to test for speed first and before you kill cards :D
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| I really dislike how the only the biggest number from each
| category is bolded. I really doubt that 5 tests was enough to
| make 21.21MB/s significantly (statistically speaking) faster than
| 21.16MB/s.
|
| Other than that, I'm really surprised by just how much faster the
| IO on the RPi4 is. Quite the difference!
| gompertz wrote:
| My thought too. Appreciate the authors effort; but given how
| tight all the numbers are along with the 5 tests, if I were the
| experimenter I'd feel like this was a big waste of my time and
| inconclusive.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Not at all IMO. Concluding that they all perform about the
| same is informative in and of itself.
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| As a reader, I found this more interesting as an IO benchmark
| of various SBCs. While it may not have been the first
| benchmark of its kind, I don't really seek out that
| information, so this was interesting to me at least.
| bmlw wrote:
| No need to worry, I often feel like what I'm doing is a waste
| of time. I do agree with what someone else said though as I
| feel like whilst the sequential reads and writes on most
| boards are largely the same, the random reads/writes are a
| little more varied and this may be what people are looking
| for. In either case, if a PS5 card performs largely the same
| as a PS15 card, I'd say it was worth doing for the money
| savings. Whether that PS5 card will last as long as the PS15
| one is a different matter but hopefully with some of the
| other tests I'm doing, we'll find out!
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| Haha I know what you mean! It was just a nitpicky thing, I
| found this interesting nevertheless.
| bmlw wrote:
| Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure if just leaving them as
| is and letting the reader decide how they want to
| interpret/read the results would be better? I'm doing these
| mainly out of my own curiosity in my endless free time at the
| moment and I'm new to creating content like this so I'm open to
| feedback!
| gruez wrote:
| Having data bars like in excel[1] solves this issue. The
| ability to easily visualize any difference is a nice bonus as
| well. For instance 2.16 MB/s vs 2.55 MB/s is statistically
| significant, but it's probably not something that you'll notice
| in regular use unless you have a stopwatch. However 2.65 MB/s
| vs 4.49 MB/s is easily noticeable.
|
| [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-data-bars-
| col...
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