It's purpose-built for that, and they even have a rackmount chassis for it, though you could design your own too. Power for the drives requires a separate power supply though.

The other option right now is the Radxa Taco (https://radxa.com/products/io-board/taco/), but availability has been scarce. I've ordered one and will hopefully test it again soon, with the CM5!

(That is, if you're wanting to go down the Pi NAS route—there are certainly other options out there!)

It includes an H.265 (up to 4K 60 fps) hardware decode block—I tested that, and it works fine—but no other video hardware encode/decode, unfortunately.

The CPU is good enough for up to H.264 1080p encode at least, and with some tweaking could get a 4K stream or multiple HD streams encoded... but it's not ideal for that use case.

If you are producing less than 1k pcs a month, than it certainly makes sense for smaller design runs. That being said, it is probably safer to eat the cost on the standard 0.1" ribbon cable header form-factor if you plan to run the line for a few years. The compute-modules have a tendency to change, and the micro-contact headers could be a failure point in some situations. Also, hardening the Pi design to be more reliable takes extensive testing, and experience.

Compared to other SoM manufacturers the Raspberry Pi foundation has a good reputation in both the open source community, and commercial roles. The pi4/5 FCC modular pre-compliance also saves around 11k USD when you go for lab testing. Also, pushing pi SoM production volumes higher means lower unit costs for everyone, and a double win is always nice.

If you don't need the gpio, than a mini PC form factor may offer more value.

There is also the Kria KR260 kits around, but it will not offer anywhere near the software/kernel ecosystem support of the pi community.

Best of luck, =3

If you plan on using it for small series of <10k/a I wouldn't worry too much

It actually can! .... if you also plug in a GPU. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/amd-radeon-pro-w7700-...

To be fair, theyve dropped the 1GB model, so do you want to compare old and new lowest specs?

I don't know about relative sales figures, I infer that 8GB is expected to be the default going forward.

USB3 could plausibly be faster than the SD card as the spec allows for 5Gbps+ but I don't know about Pis that much, I'd defer to someone with experience.

As a photographer I can tell you that SD cards, even high class ones have laughably awful speeds - any proper camera that needs to do video will use CFexpress Type B cards which are tremendously faster.

On Pi 4 I use a 2.5" SATA SSD (WD blue) on a startech USB3 adaptor and the performance seems to me much better than even good quality microsd cards.

Using an external USB3 drive also helps but it's still pretty slow. I found it too slow to use as a SAMBA file server when connected over WiFi, even though it was hardly pushing the CPU or memory. It would regularly fail to transfer large files.

One of the main selling points of the Pi 5 is faster IO. I'd love to see something tiny and power-sipping like the Zero but with the enhanced IO of the Pi 5.

Emphatically yes. It's an entirely different experience using a RPi 4 with a quality SSD. [0] It's also more expensive, so you have to decide whether that's important to you.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable...

In my opinion it's a mistake to split the difference with a cheap SSD or one you need to plug in using a SATA to USB adapter. (troubleshooting first step: if it's not the power supply, it's the SATA to USB adapter...)

After, "sudo apt-get install preload" it will cause previously used programs from the last session to auto-cache into ram. Combined with the above setting, the usual programs will launch much faster.

There is also the option to use an external SSD drive for better performance.

Part of the fun of pi4 was getting the OS optimized, but unless you have a legitimate "Sandisk Extreme Pro U3" or >30MB/sec rated sdcard it can still be slow (people have seen 4MB/sec on old counterfeit cards.)

sdcard bus overclocking is a thing as the pi tries to maximize slow hardware compatibility by default. Note this feature is limited on the pi4, but can significantly decrease boot times on older models.

YMMV =)

Thanks to Raspberry Pi providing us with an early sample, we have been able to add Compute Module 5 (CM5) compatibility to the Home Assistant Yellow

Is it? Too me it seems smaller both in width and depth, but the height seems some mm or more than a typical credit card.

I always thought it was deceptive to compare regular Pi to credit card. But I just checked and credit card is almost the same size as regular Pi.