Say I want to upgrade my uConsole to a CM5. Should I get the Lite or the eMMC version? I understand that the uConsole’s SD card slot will be rendered useless if I opt for the eMMC version. Let’s say I go the eMMC way, can I still boot/run off a USB SD card reader if I want to boot off another distro? Would the performance be much worst than the built-in SD car reader?
I mainly want to run Bookworm, but every full moon, I’d like to try something else and still have it being usable.
If you want to switch around distros at all or experiment in a way that might break your system I’d go the lite route. The EMMC will become a problem at the worst time, talking from personal experience.
I have both and won’t use the eMMC version in any enclosure again. It runs very hot and draws so much power, I get a warning that it’s unable to power some of my peripherals. The Lite version has never given me any trouble at all.
Somewhere on the forums there was a link and graph showing some speed/performance comparisons of eMMC and SD versions. While the eMMC was faster, to me it didn’t seem to be so much faster that it was worth all the hassle people have posted about on the forums.
The only argument besides a marginal read/write speed increase I’ve seen mentioned is the idea that SD cards will die and need to be replaced in time. While eMMC should theoretically last longer, it would eventually die too after enough reads/writes and at that point you’d have to either toss out and replace the entire CM4/CM5 module or try to desolder and solder a new eMMC component onto it. SD cards are cheap and easy to replace. And there are plenty of discussions online related to Raspberry Pi hardware where users either save logs to memory and only write to SD periodically (to not wear out the SD) or just log less stuff less often.
I have yet to see a solid argument for why eMMC is better in a device like this. Seems like it’s more an availability thing when purchasing?
