... we're still alive!

[CFWhitman]

I didn't read any of this until today.

The issue of eMMC size somewhat depends on how you end up using the Pyra. I see the most new-user friendly way to use the Pyra as being similar to the Pandora, and not requiring a large eMMC drive. That is, you get the basic operating system install, and you add applications and storage with the SD cards. If you have to re-install the operating system, your applications and data are back when you insert your SD card (of course, back ups are always a good thing, and lack of them is the most likely thing to bite a new user no matter which configuration you go with).

This is not intended to be an argument against a bigger eMMC drive. A bigger drive only makes the system more flexible, and is only good, other than price concerns. The real sweet spot is the place where the added expense is worth the added flexibility. At some point it won't be; it can just be hard to determine when that becomes the case. It seems likely to me that either 16GB or 32GB would be the sweet spot as far as I am concerned. The ten Euros more for the 64GB might be worth it for me on a personal basis, but is unlikely to be worth extra cash outlay for the project, since most users would probably use the Pyra in a way that never makes use of the extra space. The technically savvy users who might want to do something that required more storage can always go to a good uSD card. Yes, it's slower, but it will all seem fast compared to the Pandora.

Edit: The biggest single reason I can think of for arguing for more storage, or at least the 32GB, is the possibility of an internally installed Android build.

 

[FBnil]

Also, Kingston SD cards generally suck.

I use kingston because they are cheap. The SD card lasts me a year or so. Recently, I found out that using journalling REALLY cuts life down... so I stopped using that. Will tell you later when the card dies now...

 

[ible]

another question: is the microSD on the main board or CPU board?

just trying to pin down info for the wiki...

 

[TrashyMG]

another question: is the microSD on the main board or CPU board?

just trying to pin down info for the wiki...

on the main-board, It's a Combo uSD/SIM card socket.

 

[Blue Shadow]

I am not sure whether taken this for granted is a good idea or not. Maybe I missed that, but has this been tested (either with the Pyra, or at least a similar setup) outside some synthetic tests ? If not, it may be a good idea to wait until that has been put to use in more "practical" situations.

Thats why I said "it seems", didn't take it for granted.

But I guess most posters here do not have practical experience with mass storage memory consumption of a debian OS on OMAP5, so I figured one speculation more or less wouldn't matter.

I'm fine with wathever size will be chosen and as said the combination of all the storage options will offer a huge upgradability, but if ED want to keep the psychological 500/499€ mark, than I would rather want a smaller EMMC, simply because EDs profit margin is already small enough.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Anyone else find that their sdcards all get corrupted eventually and become un-usable? All my Pandora sd cards went this way.
Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

I guess we could copy data to the internal 16 gigabyte storage and then transfer from there to SDcard- purely to avoid removing the sd card?
That would be a long winded approach though. I think inserting and reinserting the sd cards might have caused the corruptions.

 

[TrashyMG]

Anyone else find that their sdcards all get corrupted eventually and become un-usable? All my Pandora sd cards went this way.
Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

my SD cards I use primarily for PND storage never seem to corrupt, I've had some OS images corrupting themselves over the years.

 

[Klumpen]

Anyone else find that their sdcards all get corrupted eventually and become un-usable? All my Pandora sd cards went this way.

I had this problem sometimes with SD cards regardless of the system I used them in (Caanoo, Pandora, desktop PCs). The most common cause seemed to be a combination of a bad card-reader and a USB-hub with several bad ports. The expensive Kingston reader is the worst one and the cheap card reader from EDs shop was the most reliable one yet when it's about non-micro SD cards.
Making a new partition table did always help. I'd advise on making backups of important SD cards on proper harddrives anyway.

 

[tsh]

I'm more than happy with 32 GB based on the prices. I still have a nagging doubt about speed (and having plenty of unused space might be a benefit). My TF201 tablet started out with the slowest eMMC on the planet, and is surely now far slower than it was when I bought it - but it looks like people are looking at speed numbers (and tech must have moved on a little in the past 4 years...)

Seems the question of options has faded - 128GB for a premium of €100 might be cost-effective considering the problems with splitting/baking a tray, but with the base storage at 32 BG I think the demand would be much weaker. Pre-installed (and hence trusted) uSD sounds like a choice worth offering at some point for the less adventurous customers.

 

[levi]

I had this problem sometimes with SD cards regardless of the system I used them in (Caanoo, Pandora, desktop PCs). The most common cause seemed to be a combination of a bad card-reader and a USB-hub with several bad ports. The expensive Kingson reader is the worst one and the cheap card reader from EDs shop was the most reliable one yet when it's about non-micro SD cards.
Making a new partition table did always help. I'd advise on making backups of important SD cards on proper harddrives anyway.

Yeah, the only card I've lost so far was the first 64GB card I bought, due to formatting it on the in-built SD card slot on my laptop. I didn't know then about leaving space before the first partition, so that might have been a cause, but I had other problems with this slot under Debian (and haven't used it at all since installing Arch). Anything I've formatted using my sandisk card reader has been fine, but yeah I really should backup my PNDs - that's long overdue.

 

[canseco]

16GB seems enough for me, but 32 would be better.
Rigth now, i have 25GB used, and more than 1700 programs installed on my PC with Arch Linux,

So far i had no problems with SD cards from Dragonbox Shop, (using ext4 since the beginning), they still hold up, and having journaling helps to recover or get rid of corrupted data.

I always do triple backup on everything important. I did only double backup before and failed in a big way...

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I had this problem sometimes with SD cards regardless of the system I used them in (Caanoo, Pandora, desktop PCs). The most common cause seemed to be a combination of a bad card-reader and a USB-hub with several bad ports. The expensive Kingson reader is the worst one and the cheap card reader from EDs shop was the most reliable one yet when it's about non-micro SD cards.
Making a new partition table did always help. I'd advise on making backups of important SD cards on proper harddrives anyway.

My card reader was cheap- it could have been problematic then. I see journaling mentioned below but iv'e never heard of it?

 

[Swordfish II]

Anyone else find that their sdcards all get corrupted eventually and become un-usable? All my Pandora sd cards went this way.
Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

I guess we could copy data to the internal 16 gigabyte storage and then transfer from there to SDcard- purely to avoid removing the sd card?
That would be a long winded approach though. I think inserting and reinserting the sd cards might have caused the corruptions.

I noticed torrenting has corrupted my cards a couple times (nothing else has done it) but I was able to use a tool (gparted) to repair the partition table with no data loss.

 

[Haraldur]

it's still internal storage, since it's tough to get to the micro SD card, and you can say it's upgradeable internal storage, too.

That's a point. Obviously, the Pyra would need to be opened to access the the microSD card slot, and also the SIM card slot, but would any other things need to be detached to upgrade the microSD card? If so, then providing pre-installed microSD cards may be a valuable service for the clumsy and/or paranoid. I am occasionally paranoid.

Plus, providing to customers (micro)SD cards that are trusted to be reliable is likely good for consumer satisfaction.

 

[A2000]

Anyone else find that their sdcards all get corrupted eventually and become un-usable? All my Pandora sd cards went this way.
Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

None of my SD-Cards got corrupted in about the last 10 (?) years, and I bought quite a lot whenever they became bigger. So I do own everything between 1 GB and 128 GB.
I think there are three reasons for this:
1. There is only one brand I trust in: Sandisk.
2. I only buy from reliable sources which naturally excludes Amazon!
3. I usually by their top end cards (mostly Sandisk Extreme, sometimes Sandisk Ultra)
My filesystem on both cards in my Pandora is ext4 which is journalling and if IIRC the cards are 3 years old and in almost daily use.

Conclusion: I think you actually are doing something wrong.

 

[Agricola]

That's a point. Obviously, the Pyra would need to be opened to access the the microSD card slot, and also the SIM card slot, but would any other things need to be detached to upgrade the microSD card?

Battery cover, battery itself and SIM card need to be removed. No tools like screwdrivers required (in contrast to the SoC board).

I personally am not a big fan of selling µSD cards as internal storage, just say that it's easily upgradeable and let everyone choose whichever SD card brand they want to use. But of course, that's only my opinion and ED bundelling this together does not affect me in any way, so if people want that and don't feel cheated by it because they didn't read and find out it's not really "internal" storage and easier replacable than µSD cards on a Galaxy Note II, it should be offered.

2. I only buy from reliable sources which naturally excludes Amazon!

What? Do you mean Amazon Marketplace? I mean, you can get brand new and SanDisk-packaged SD cards by Amazon itself, the marketplace is in my experience the only source of fakes and used ones there. And just out of interest, what's a reliable source to you?

1. There is only one brand I trust in: Sandisk.

I was once like this, too, but Transcend is also pretty cool and reliable. And they don't cheat nearly as much about speed as SanDisk.

 

[A2000]

Back to topic.
While I most definitely don't need more than 16GB, I always feel comfortable with some more space as I tend to use a lot of partitions. Which automatically leads to unused space if one doesn't want to repartition. So 32GB is what I like to see in my Pyra.
That said I too can see that 64GB would be an appealing size for all the folks out there who tend to just compare naked numbers when deciding what gadget is good enough for them and which is not. Might get ED some more sales in the end. But not if the prize goes beyond some threshold: 499 Euro, 549 or 599 US$, 444 GBP and so on.
[doublepost=1459805751,1459805114][/doublepost]

What? Do you mean Amazon Marketplace? I mean, you can get brand new and SanDisk-packaged SD cards by Amazon itself, the marketplace is in my experience the only source of fakes and used ones there. And just out of interest, what's a reliable source to you?


I was once like this, too, but Transcend is also pretty cool and reliable. And they don't cheat nearly as much about speed as SanDisk.

Amazon wants you to consider the Marketplace is as save as Amazon itself and if one compares prizes for sd-cards most people tend to buy the way cheaper cards from the Marketplace.
Do you think most people distinguish between Amazon and it's Marketplace?

Reichelt is a reliable source in Germany.

The most obvious difference between Sandisk and their competitors is that Sandisk produces the chips whereas others just buy them (often from Sandisk itself). That gives the former the opportunity to better select the quality they need for a certain range of cards.

 

[levi]

Personally, I only trust Sandisk and Samsung cards - to the best of my knowledge, they're the only manufacturers that produce both the flash and the controller chip. Other makes have to source certain parts from others, and that introduced the risks of fakes in the channel. Mind you, for all I know sandisk or samsung might buy external parts especially on cheaper bits, if they can buy them cheaper than they can make them.

 

[Christoph.Krn]

[...] But not if the prize goes beyond some threshold: 499 Euro, 549 or 599 US$, 444 GBP and so on.

Prices in Germany and UK are including taxes (it should be 19% in Germany in case of the Pyra, right @EvilDragon ?), but prices in the US are before taxes and the final price including taxes will vary from region to region.
[doublepost=1459808013,1459807414][/doublepost]Wait, no... how does this work for online shopping in the US? I don't actually know that...

 

[TrashyMG]

Prices in Germany and UK are including taxes (it should be 19% in Germany in case of the Pyra, right @EvilDragon ?), but prices in the US are before taxes and the final price including taxes will vary from region to region.
[doublepost=1459808013,1459807414][/doublepost]Wait, no... how does this work for online shopping in the US? I don't actually know that...

It depends on the State really, many online stores just don't conciser taxes and we are supposed to declare it when filing our taxes each year. Some online stores will respect state laws and will add on the tax at time of purchase, so it's a mess really. If I was to order from Dragonbox, we just don't have to pay for the VAT.