Raspberry Pi now sells its own branded microSD cards

8 October 2024, 21:50 published

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Raspberry Pi owners of all stripes can now purchase branded SD cards optimised for the Pi ecosystem directly from sanctioned resellers, with additional performance enhancements promised for the Pi 5 specifically.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the company has teamed up with OEM card vendor Longsys to ensure the new cards “offer exceptional random read and write throughput” on any and all Pi computers, while support for command queuing (CQ) on the Raspberry PI 5 will push them even further.

Unlocking this additional functionality in the Pi 5’s host controller requires an update to the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS; which does of course mean that users running other Linux distributions are out of luck for the foreseeable future.

Command queuing

CQ-compatible cards can, with the right hardware, take read/write commands in any order from the read/write queue.

The release of the Pi 5 did not initially feature support in its host controller for CQ, which supersedes the legacy SD Host Controller Interface (SDHCI) interface when a compatible card is detected, because of it only previously being available on eMMC devices until a Pi developer decided in 2024 to work on adding the support to Pi OS directly.

While this is good news, the Pi Foundation admit that it’s not quite the speed revolution you might be expecting: “command queuing lets the flash controller hide more of the latency associated with accessing disparate NAND flash pages”, it says, noting that cards are capable of “better throughput” “in theory”.

Pi SD cards

Still, it’s a new product to sell, and the Pi foundation reports that retailers have been instructed to only promote its own cards as well as include them in bundles. At resellers, that appear to be free to price the products with some degree of wiggle room, the new SD cards have been priced around $10/£10 for 32GB and $20/£20 for 64GB.

Other cards may be cheaper, but one that truly adheres to the A2 specification, and allows for command queuing on true A2 cards in Pi 5 computers, may be a worthwhile purchase for those new to the Pi microcomputer or enthusiasts looking to quickly get up and running.

Meanwhile, a brand new, snap-on, durable case made of silicon, the Raspberry Pi Bumper, is now available for the Pi 5. It protects both the Pi “and the surface you’re putting it down on”, and is just $3. The case will also fit the Active Cooler heatsink-and-fan combo for the Pi.