Raspberry Pi 4 and Sandisk Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-II, do they play well together?

MyBoxLife

In the process of buying the SD storage for the RPi 4 4GB, and trying to evaluate whether there's advantage to be had in the faster speeds, whether the RPi's SD card slot would be able to take advantage of the quoted 275MB/s transfer speeds, and whether the advantage outweighs the price difference? Take into account that the card, which comes in flavors of 64 and 128GB, would have to be reformatted to FAT32 from exFAT, unsure whether that'd play a part. Going by Amazon UK prices, and comparing the 64GB offerings of the Extreme Pro UHS-II, and the Extreme Pro UHS-I; the latter comes in at £18.41, and the II at £58.26 :0, that may have made my mind up , interested to hear thoughts nevertheless, it'd be good to know if and how it'd compare, running the RPi as a desktop or resource hungry projects. Thanks for you input!

EndlessWaves

The sequential transfer rates you quote aren't very important for desktop use. Access times and IOPS at low queue depths and chunk sizes are much more influential and SD cards connected to readers on a USB bus are universally poor there.

It looks like the Pi 4's sequential transfer rates top out at about 45MB/s
                                                                                                                                                                                                        Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison - 2019 | Jeff Geerling                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        www.jeffgeerling.com                                                                               

Basically, the Pi is entirely the wrong choice of platform if you need good disk performance.

MyBoxLife

Thanks, wasn't if the RPi would be the platform for the build, committed to the hardware, was more of a, what can the RPi take advantage of as far as the SD card speeds go, and if I'm reading into it correctly, it'd be a no on the extra expenditure in card speeds, making me consider whether the Sandisk Ultra 1A would be the go-to option instead, currently at £9.98.

MyBoxLife

Jeff Greeding on Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison.

Went with the 32GB SanDisk Extreme.