It's about time they put some FLASH on-board. SD card has proven time and time again an unreliable medium. You never know if the device would boot up after a "dirty shutdown"
Personally, I liked the SD Card method. It allowed me to keep a few cards with different OS images on them, and quickly swap them out when I wanted to change what the device was used for.
It might be a bit more difficult with the built in storage, but I suppose it's nothing that can't be managed.
Yes but say I need to run a rails application with a DB on a Lan (less than 15 users), perfomance is not an issue (nginx + postgresql + puma uses less than 115 MB of RAM!) The only thing stopping you is SDCard's reliability!
A friend of mine had two unrecoverably broken Kingston class 10 SDCards on the same RPi in 6 months. Bad luck maybe, but still I'd love to have something more solid to run applications without fear of data loss.
Correct me if I am wrong but it is my understanding that you can still have read problems on an RO SD card. In fact I was recently reading a Micron Application note that explained that the mere act of reading it could cause bit-flips.
Isn't the eMMC card basically an "SD" card as a chip? Thus this machine should having the same problems with unreliable shutdown and wear-leveling as the normal Pi, with the added culprit that you cannot swap the card for a new one.
A lot of the unreliability comes from the connector, and a lot more comes from crappy counterfeit SD cards.
If you still want an SD card (I don't -- network and USB are so much faster), I expect you could buy an IO board with one or more. I don't see one on the Pi Foundation's board right now but it should be easy to add.
My understanding is eMMC flash memory is an SD card soldered onto a board, so if anything that problem could be worse without the advantage of a removable card
It's very similar but often faster. The Odroid U2 uses removable EMMC storage which has an SD card adaptor, which I feel is a very good middle ground (most of the advantages of both with the disadvantage that the connector on the board is non-standard).
It might be a bit more difficult with the built in storage, but I suppose it's nothing that can't be managed.