Raspberry Pi owners of all shapes and sizes can now purchase branded SD cards optimized for the Pi ecosystem directly from approved resellers, with additional performance improvements promised specifically for the Pi 5.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced The company has worked with OEM card supplier Longsys to ensure the new cards “provide exceptional random read and write throughput” on all Pi computers, while command queuing (CQ) support on the Raspberry PI 5 will push them even further .
To unlock this additional functionality in the Pi 5’s host controller, an update to the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS is required; which of course means that users using other Linux distributions will be out of luck for the foreseeable future.
Command queue
CQ-compatible cards can, with the appropriate hardware, take read/write commands from the read/write queue in any order.
The release of the Pi 5 initially did not include support in the host controller for CQ, which replaces the older SD Host Controller Interface (SDHCI) interface when a compatible card is detected, as it was previously only available on eMMC devices until a Pi The developer decided to work on adding support directly to Pi OS in 2024.
While this is good news, the Pi Foundation admits that this isn’t quite the speed revolution you might expect: “command queuing allows the flash controller to hide more of the latency associated with accessing disparate NAND flash pages,” says the foundation, 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 their own cards and include them in bundles as well. With resellers, who appear to be free to price the products with some leeway, the new SD cards are priced around $10/£10 for 32GB and $20/£20 for 64GB.
Other cards may be cheaper, but a card that truly meets the A2 specification and allows command queuing on true A2 cards in Pi 5 computers could be a worthwhile purchase for those new to the Pi microcomputer or for enthusiasts who want to get up quickly and run.
Meanwhile, a brand new snap-on, durable silicon case, the Raspberry Pi Bumper, is now available for the Pi 5. It protects both the Pi “and the surface you put it on,” and is just $3. The case also fits the Active Cooler heatsink-and-fan combination for the Pi.