Pros and Cons of using the eMMC memory

jonathan

Dear Bela team & community,

I've just got a general question. Recently I noticed it's possible to flash a Bela image to the eMMC -- see this entry on the Bela github: https://github.com/BelaPlatform/Bela/wiki/Manage-your-SD-card#flashing-the-bela-image

I'm just curious: what are the pros and cons of flashing to the eMMC? Is performance/reliability improved at all either way?

I noticed this post -- https://forum.bela.io/d/178-booting-from-emmc -- where AndyCap gets an almost threefold performance improvement on read/writes. Could flashing to the eMMC be a preferred option for installations that have to run over a long period of time? Or for instruments that need to be finalized? I'm not familiar with the differences between on-board flash and SD, so this is mainly a question of curiosity :-)

best

Jon

AndyCap

The main problem with the eMMC is if you are writing to it all the time, like an SD card it will fail in the end but unlike an SD card it is not easily replaceable.

The ideal solution would probably be to have the eMMC set up as a read only boot with temp files and any other writable paths either on a ram disk or SD card or combination.

Or you could just not worry about it and when the eMMC fails start using a SD disk!

giuliomoro

Let me add that if you have a newer BeagleBone, an SD with the old v0.2 image(which we shipped until October 2017) will not allow you to flash the eMMC. You would need a v0.3.1 image. Also the instructions to flash it are different, see at the link above.

jonathan

Thanks guys. Ok, sounds like a pretty clear choice: if you're not doing many writes - perhaps with a finalized installation that's been sorted out on an SD card - then it's not a bad idea to flash to the eMMC. :-)