[justin66]

> Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

Judging by how often people talk about the feature online (or how often they enquired about the delay in implementating it on pi 4 - it's been possible with the 3 forever), a lot.

> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

This is a not entirely uncommon but very badly thought out feature suggestion for the pi that comes from technical people who aren't the target audience and don't understand the target audience for the pi. It'd be an okay feature on the Pi compute module.

First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."

> low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.

If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.

Consumer grade sd cards are... cheap. It's not such a problem for a lot of the Pi's applications. I'm happy to use cheap sd cards to boot Pi 3s that serve as music players while using a Samsung T5 on the Pi that serves the music, for example (and on a development system).

[barumi]

> First things first, though: if you're really worried about storage reliability on these things (or anything), please stop prefacing your hardware suggestions with "cheap."

What would be the cost implications of adding SATA support for a Raspberry Pi?

And keep in mind that nowadays the price point of a fully kitted raspberry pi is already close to 100$.

[justin66]

As far as the BOM, you're asking the wrong guy, but someone upthread mentioned that it'd have to run off the usb, which is one of the reasons why you'd have to wonder what the point really is.

One very real cost would be the increase in size to the PCB and everyone's cases. Plus, we could talk about how external sata just isn't very good as a user experience, while usb is.

I haven't shopped for really cheap storage hardware lately but I question that there's really an area where sata could be a cost win.

> And keep in mind that nowadays the price point of a fully kitted raspberry pi is already close to 100$.

There's a really wide variance there, though - you can get a lot done for under $50.

[candiodari]

> If you're trying to get this much value out of the thing, using either a legitimate, brand name USB ssd (not something cobbled together in a cheap enclosure), an industrial SD card built for embedded applications, or network booting are all good options.

Better option: if you use SD, use 2 and monitor.