[metildaa]

This is part of the attraction of alternative boards like the OrangePi PC+, for $32.50 I get a board with fast eMMC, a case and a 5v 3A charger that is all known to work well together, with the downside being it takes 2 weeks to turn up from China: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32669760149.html

I'm rather surprised that there is still no SPI Flash or eMMC onboard this latest Raspberry Pi, MicroSD cards are significantly slower than eMMC, and even some cheap SPI Flash would be great to let you throw a small backup distro on the RasPi for when you have no SD card inserted (or the card has failed/corrupted)

[bsmith]

This. If you do anything write-intensive at all, it's not only slow, but extremely failure-prone. We moved to the BeagleBone Black, and most recently, Intel NUC, to resolve these issues.

[lampington]

Agreed. I was planning to set up a pi as a media server sharing out a synced Dropbox folder, but the long term reliability of the storage made that impossible. Sure, you can attach USB storage (and that should be pretty fast with the Pi4) but then the tiny form factor is lost.

[vardump]

Well, MicroSD cards go up to 250 MB/s. ~100 MB/s reads and 80 MB/s writes are typical for good new cards.

I guess eMMC goes up to 500 MB/s. I do wonder how much that fast eMMC chips cost, though.

A bit below 50 MB/s on RPi4 is actually pretty ok for most cases and whenever it's not, one can use an SSD over USB3.

Just need to make sure you have a good power supply and good quality cards, and SD card corruption is unlikely.

[metildaa]

Random I/O is much better on eMMC than MicroSD, which is very noticeable when using a SBC as a desktop.