![]() 3 USB 2.0 ports (which need to be enabled to work).It preserves most of the ports you would get on a full size IO board in half the space, including: Outside of commercial use, the $100 dollar price tag is a little high for the 'impulse buy then stick it in a drawer' use case most of us using Pis are familiar with.īut it's a great, compact board for things like Pi clusters, remote camera installations, or an interactive display system. It also includes a 5 volt, 3.5 amp fuse to protect against overcurrent, and also supports Power over Ethernet through the standard Pi PoE HAT, since it includes the extra four pins used to extract power from the ethernet connector and deliver it to the HAT. You can either use a barrel plug (like the regular Compute Module IO board) or a 3.5mm terminal block, and power the board with between 7.5 to 28V of DC power. The TOFU has another feature that's extremely useful in industrial settings: It accepts a wide range of power inputs. And the Raspberry Pi Compute Module is a great platform to build on, since it can run a full Linux OS and is easy to remotely administer. ![]() Industrial UseĪs more industrial systems require more Internet connectivity, it's important to make robust control boards with both wireless and wired networking. The TOFU includes a built-in SIM tray, so you can get mobile service on the board. What it's really designed for is a 4G LTE module, like a Sierra Wireless AirPrime. NVMe drives are only one of the accessories you can install on the TOFU, though. Update: Apparently this week NVMe SSD Boot was just added as a beta feature in the Pi firmware, though it requires a bit of a process to use it: NVMe SSD Boot (BETA). It seems like it may happen, but there's no timeline for it yet. The Pi's firmware needs to be updated to support this feature. ![]() Unfortunately, you can't boot off an NVMe drive-at least not yet. Direct SATA and NVMe connection is a lot faster, plus cabling (especially for NVMe. Since the NVMe drive communicates directly over the Pi's PCI express bus, it performs much better on every benchmark.Īnd yes, the two drives are not the exact same but after testing a few dozen SATA SSDs and NVMe drives, both natively and through USB adapters, I can say with confidence that the USB adapters soak up at least 10-20% of the bandwidth, and it's worse for random IO, which requires better latency. I compared this setup to a similarly-priced SSD I reviewed in the Argon One M.2, which connects an SSD inside the same case as a Pi 4, but using a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter. I bought a KingSpec 128GB 2242 NVMe drive, and after installing it, it showed up using lsblk, and I could format and mount it like any other drive. Of course, if you taped it down it would work, but that's not a great solution:īut 42mm devices work great, as long as driver support is present on the Pi-and for NVMe drives, at least, Pi OS includes support out of the box. Other boards have 30mm 'A+E' key slots, that accept things like the Google Coral TPU, or WiFi 6 cards like the Intel AX200 I tested.īut the TOFU has a 'B' type M.2 2242 socket, meaning it accepts only B or B+M key devices.Īnd the slot on this board only has one standoff at 42 millimeters, so you can't fit shorter devices like a 30 mm 'B+M key' NVMe, like the WD SN520. Some other Compute Module 4 boards I've been keeping my eye on are designed around the more popular 'M key' slot in the 80mm form factor. Let's start on the bottom, and take a look at the M.2 slot on the TOFU. I also posted a video that goes along with this blog post on my YouTube channel: The board is just 9 centimeters square, yet packs in most of the same features on the much larger Compute Module 4 IO Board: ![]() I'd like to thank the Swiss company Oratek for sending me this TOFU board. Now, a single x1 lane at gen 2 speeds tops out around 400 MiB/sec in real-world usage, so many NVMe drives are still underpowered connected to the Pi, but as you'll see in a bit, a cheap KingSpec SSD was 3x faster for random IO than a similar SSD plugged in via USB 3.0. The Compute Module 4, however doesn't presume anything-it exposes the PCIe lane directly to any card it plugs into.Īnd in the case of Oratek's TOFU, it's exposed through an M.2 slot, making this board the first one I've used that can accept native NVMe storage, directly under the Pi: The Pi 4 actually has an x1 PCI Express gen 2.0 lane, but the USB 3.0 controller chip populates that bus on the model B. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling mess and lose bandwidth and latency to a USB-to-SATA or USB-to-NVMe adapter. well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but. Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects.
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