doubt in beaglebone board

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1

hi everybody..
i'm planning to purchase beaglebone, but i have some doubts,
my doubts is :
1. beaglebone is not having nor/nand flash on it's board, so the linux
image has to be stored in the sd-card. will that affect the
performance of the board.

Is my doubt valid, if yes can someone clarify my doubt.

2

Ajinkya Jambekar wrote:

hi everybody..
i'm planning to purchase beaglebone, but i have some doubts,
my doubts is :
1. beaglebone is not having nor/nand flash on it's board, so the linux
image has to be stored in the sd-card. will that affect the
performance of the board.

maybe, maybe not. Since there is no baseline value for
the "performance" to compare against, how do you expect
this question to be answered?

3

This is a difficult question to answer, as Vladimir says, since we
don't understand what your expectations are. Can you clarify what
your expectations are for "performance?"

There exist SD cards that are amazingly fast, but they're not the
cheap ones. If high performance is your goal, going to an MMC
connected flash device may even be faster than using raw flash (since
processor no longer has to manage everything, it spends time doing
important things).

-Andrew

4

Can you recommend a manufacturer/type of SD card? Price is not the primary issue.

5

i'm not sure the manufacturer is the bug issue, what you want for
speed are "class 10" cards. they'll definitely be pricier, but you're
paying for speed.

rday

6

You can start with known working cards first, then try out cheaper brands and configurations.
Special Computing has microSD cards known to work with BeagleBone boards, and has pre-formatted cards too.

7

I'm having good luck with SanDisk Mobile Ultra 8GB cards. They have a
4GB variety also which should be similar (although I haven't tested
it, yet). I've tested the 8GB version with flashbench, results here:
http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/flashbench-results/2011-December/000240.html

You can get flashbench from Linaro (Arnd's repo):
http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/arnd/flashbench.git

Link to SanDisk site:
http://sandisk.com/products/mobile1-memory-products/ultra-microsdhc-memory-card

I paid about $18 each for my SanDisk Mobile Ultra 8GB cards at
MacMall. That was a good price when I bought them about 2 months
ago. I need to test the Kingston cards that ship with the BeagleBoard-
xM and BeagleBone. Based on some other testing I've done with
similarly marked (physical markings on the cards) I don't think
they're very high performance (but they are cheap! :).

-Andrew