What storage available for the PI in 2020?

[v81]

Purchasing a pi4 to use with a NEXDOCK (like a laptop, but with no computer inside).
Looking to use it as a daily driver *nix desktop machine.
Wanting to balance performance and keen on getting storage media that is not a bottleneck for random I/O.

Previously fast & durable SLC / MLC microSD cards were the go.
I don't know why but they seem hard to buy now, at least in Australia.

I recall there being a google sheet made public where users could shard benchmark results of their RasPi storage media.
Does this still exist, and if so any chance of a link?

Other options I'm looking at are a fast, durable USB flash drive or a USB to mSATA / M.2 SATA or NVME adapter.

Looking for about 64GB of storage, 32GB might do.

Any suggestions?

[Diablo2_Fan]

Any cheap SSD and an adapter.

[BeauSlim]

Any cheap SSD and an adapter.

It's not quite that simple. There are some SSD-USB adapters/enclosures that work better with Raspbian, so you'll want to search these forums for recommendations. You'll want working UAS at a minimum, and also TRIM and SMART support if at all possible.

[HawaiianPi]

There are "A1" app performance rated micro SD cards, and those would be the fastest solution if you intend to use only SD card storage. Don't bother with "A2" rated cards, as those only work properly on A2 compliant devices, which there are very few of (the Raspberry Pi is not).

For your relatively small storage needs a SanDisk Ultra A1 micro SD card would be a good option. I have several Pi computers running from those, and they make a noticeable improvement in performance.

The Pi 4B has USB 3.0, so you have USB 3.0 SSD as another option (or a fast USB 3.0 stick/thumb/flash drive). The Pi4 currently won't boot directly from USB, but that will be added in a future firmware update. You can either boot from SD card and use the SSD as fast storage, or start the boot process from SD card, then load and run the OS from USB/SSD.

It's not quite that simple. There are some SSD-USB adapters/enclosures that work better with Raspbian, so you'll want to search these forums for recommendations. You'll want working UAS at a minimum, and also TRIM and SMART support if at all possible.

Yup, this is true. This should get better over time with improvements to firmware, but if you want something now, I'd suggest SATA-III SSD with a USB 3.0 adapter, since you can easily replacing the adapter if you run into problems.

Don't bother with NVMe, it will cost much more but make little difference on the Raspberry Pi (NVMe to USB 3.0 is a massive bottleneck, and even more on the Pi4, where all 4 USB ports share a single 4Gbps PCIe lane).