I had a heck of a time trying to use the Rpi3 for anything heavy, such as a personal computer, video streaming, android tablet alternative, or hi-fi audio server. It just wasn't powerful enough.
My main issue was trying to use it to stream DSD audio. It would freeze up even with extravagant cooling on the CPU. ram didn't seem to be the issue, it was the CPU that couldn't handle the load.
And android software wouldn't allow for video playback at all.
Any opinion if the Rpi4 will be able to handle this stuff?
Lots of great improvements and good points but some missed chances:
- Can't natively boot from SSD
- mini-HDMI cables have notoriously bad quality
- SD-cards aren't reliable storage, fail quite quickly
- no video/ data over USB-C?
I understand they have to make choices and it's an all-around good product. I was hoping for SSD-boot and USB-C video.
@abetancort I'm aware of the endurance versions of SD-cards but those still fail a lot faster than any SSD or HDD would.. See how many photographers have had SD-cards fail (I would guess all professionals have had at least 1 fail) and how many use SD-cards for long-term storage (I guess none because data corruption / degrading over time is a real issue with SD-cards. Now RPi's are used for all kinds of setups and some of those are for Home Automation for instance. If the risk of coming home to find none of your smarthome working anymore is 10 times bigger with SD-cards than with SSD's ... you're gonna want an SSD to boot your RPi ;)
@max_de_vos I, myself never had a failure with premium brand sd-cards.
We don’t use them as permanent storage: not because they are not reliable but because the Premium (fast) ones that we use cost way more per GB than even what Apple charges per GB of SSD.
By the way I have had a total of two failures of SSD drives, thanks god that I backup my work to a Raid 5 + hot spare.
If your photographs are lost, you have waisted resources and the time of a lot of people that you will need to rehire, your client is not going to be very happy and many times a photograph can not be remade, that is when you’re in real deep shit.
That’s why pro-cameras come with slots for two cards to copy the raws in parallel to both and we happily pay double for the same storage space.
Always backup your work, in real time if at all possible, both in your computer and in your camera. Better safe than sorry.
Having the option to choose ram at different price points is just such an awesome addition to the lineup. I dont see why (other than possibly it being linux) this isn't a competitor for home desktops/school IT rooms now.
Was really excited about this but then saw a demo video and its still just short of being a basic desktop, which would have been amazing. Will definitely happen the next time.