SD card requirements for Pine Phone (Brave Heart edition)

[bcnaz]

 
   I cannot find the requirements for the Pine phone SD card, except it is 'microSD'

     and it supports SDHC and SDXC

     No mention of supported speed  ?

    IF we are testing the Brave Heart from the SD card,  I would like to use the fastest that it supports, 
       but not too excessively faster...

     I looked in the wiki,  that is where I found the above information.

             Did I miss it somewhere  ? 

        Thanks for any info,   BC

---

[fire219]

The A64 SoC supports up to UHS-1 class cards, in the SDR50 mode. This means a maximum transfer rate of 50MB/s. Though it may not be a bad idea to get a faster/better card than that rating, because better cards have better (more durable) flash dies, and are more likely to actually sustain that speed.

[nas]

The A64 SoC supports up to UHS-1 class cards, in the SDR50 mode. This means a maximum transfer rate of 50MB/s. 

I had a read through the below thread which states max 23MB/s for sequential transfer (although the random read/write rate seems to be more important). It also suggests UHS-1 cards are only supported for compatibility versus higher speeds. Is the information outdated?

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...64#pid8864

[dukla2000]

    IF we are testing the Brave Heart from the SD card,  I would like to use the fastest that it supports, 
       but not too excessively faster...

---

My thoughts are - any of my menagerie of cards should be OK for playing the various options in the beginning. As soon as I find an OS that I think is "best" (whatever that may mean) I will want to copy it across to eMMC for best speed results. And reliability/integrity (I have yet to have a notable SDcard failure but am well aware eMMC/SSD etc are designed for RW use on a general purpose computer, unlike SDcards designed for writing photos, videos etc.) Thereafter I can still keep playing other options on SDcards.

I am sure as per Raspberry Pi and others, cards with good random read speed of small files are preferable. My choice has always been Samsung Evo+, others love whichever Sandisk flavour is similar. But on the PinePhone I see the SDcard as a means to an end, not the end.

[nas]

    IF we are testing the Brave Heart from the SD card,  I would like to use the fastest that it supports, 
       but not too excessively faster...

---

My thoughts are - any of my menagerie of cards should be OK for playing the various options in the beginning. As soon as I find an OS that I think is "best" (whatever that may mean) I will want to copy it across to eMMC for best speed results.

Agree with the conclusion but I guess it couldn't hurt to select an A2 card at current prices? Then again, that would appear to be a mistake according to the below article.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/a...spberry-pi

[z4v4l]

A64 does support UHS-I, but, there is a big problem with SBCs, when even SoC vendors make their evaluating boards with new SoCs crippled down to the legacy only speeds (~20 MB/s). this is because somehow the need of providing 1.8V voltage regulator for the SD controller is often omitted and it runs 3.3V only. there is such a thing - PMIC, it supplies different voltages to the SoC power domains, if you wanna use UHS-I modes, your SD controller needs a separate voltage regulator inside a PMIC, then it queries voltage switch and goes from 3.3V to 1.8V - this is needed for UHS-I modes. so, it would be very probable to say, that pinephone is limited to the legacy modes just as Pine64 boards (and other a64 featuring products) are. Rock64, on the other hand, got UHS-I modes since the v3 of the board. kudos for Pine for taking that effort, even despite Rockchip's bad example of crippling down thier own SoCs (if I got it right, their own evaluation boards for rk3328, didn't get UHS-I, even the accompanying PMIC, intended for usage with rk3328 has been designed with suckily small amount of regulators).
theoretically, UHS-I could bring you an almost HDD speed of 104MB/s (read), but again, Rockchip sets the input frequency for eMMC/SD at 150 MHz (as opposed to 208 maximum, probably due to stability reasons), which with the fattest mode SDR104 will give us ~75 MB/s. I saw similar test results with Tinkerboard (rk3288) and here with RockPro64 (rk3399). for loading something meaty, a x3 speed increase is not bad. but it's not for a64. but maybe I'm wrong and Pine with pinephone has tried to overcome vendors stupidity just like they had with Rock64v3. the PMIC in question is AXP something and if it has enough regulators, it could be possible to allocate one for the a64's SD controller.
somehow, this very important aspect (putting the storage efficiency at its best possible level) gets overlooked by users, they are more concerned with such stuff like how "blobless"/open/schmopen/fsfapproved a device is or with those stupid kill switches, or keyboard running (buggy) firmware for powering off wifi. >_>

[bcnaz]

A64 does support UHS-I, but, there is a big problem with SBCs, when even SoC vendors make their evaluating boards with new SoCs crippled down to the legacy only speeds (~20 MB/s). this is because somehow the need of providing 1.8V voltage regulator for the SD controller is often omitted and it runs 3.3V only. there is such a thing - PMIC, it supplies different voltages to the SoC power domains, if you wanna use UHS-I modes, your SD controller needs a separate voltage regulator inside a PMIC, then it queries voltage switch and goes from 3.3V to 1.8V - this is needed for UHS-I modes. so, it would be very probable to say, that pinephone is limited to the legacy modes just as Pine64 boards (and other a64 featuring products) are. Rock64, on the other hand, got UHS-I modes since the v3 of the board. kudos for Pine for taking that effort, even despite Rockchip's bad example of crippling down thier own SoCs (if I got it right, their own evaluation boards for rk3328, didn't get UHS-I, even the accompanying PMIC, intended for usage with rk3328 has been designed with suckily small amount of regulators).
theoretically, UHS-I could bring you an almost HDD speed of 104MB/s (read), but again, Rockchip sets the input frequency for eMMC/SD at 150 MHz (as opposed to 208 maximum, probably due to stability reasons), which with the fattest mode SDR104 will give us ~75 MB/s. I saw similar test results with Tinkerboard (rk3288) and here with RockPro64 (rk3399). for loading something meaty, a x3 speed increase is not bad. but it's not for a64. but maybe I'm wrong and Pine with pinephone has tried to overcome vendors stupidity just like they had with Rock64v3. the PMIC in question is AXP something and if it has enough regulators, it could be possible to allocate one for the a64's SD controller.
somehow, this very important aspect (putting the storage efficiency at its best possible level) gets overlooked by users, they are more concerned with such stuff like how "blobless"/open/schmopen/fsfapproved a device is or with those stupid kill switches, or keyboard running (buggy) firmware for powering off wifi. >_>

 
   SO ... SD cards in the 80 - 100 MB/s range are safely above what the Pine phone can handle, without being
  a big waste of cost in   'over-kill'  ?
     Thank You,   BC

[malvcr]

You know? ... the operating systems available are very immature by now. I am using just some laboratory SD I had around and I will not use a lot of money trying to squeeze the speed on the phone ( maybe class 10, I don't remember clearly in this moment ). I switched OS several times in some days.

When the phone be well supported it is a different story ;-)

[bcnaz]

** Running on an SD card, I do not expect very much speed.
I just want to know the SD card will not be limiting the performance...

[dukla2000]

FWIW thought I would post some numbers I have recorded on Brave Heart boot speed. I am timing with a stopwatch from the time I power up the charger (which triggers a Brave Heart power on) till the time the OS start screen is "stable". In this case the OS is always postmarketOS/phosh.

49 seconds with no-name U1 C10 SDcard that in general I think is OK for speed.
35 seconds with U3 Samsung Evo+
29 seconds from eMMC