One issue that people have observed with the Raspberry Pi, is it’s sensitivity to less-than-stellar brands of SD cards.
It turns out that there’s a reason for this:
- Older, or less brilliant SD cards tend to be slower than newer, higher quality cards.
- By default, the “number of retries” given a SD card if it didn’t come right up was a big fat ZERO! In other words, if it didn’t come up first-time, the Pi simply gave up and went home.
There is a new beta firmware update available that can be installed on a Pi-4 that helps eliminate this.
Additionally, it updates the way the USB3 interfaces are enumerated on boot-up, to provide improved compatibility with USB3 external devices when booting.
There’s a whole lot of interesting information located here:
This EEPROM update is, very likely, already on your Pi. All you have to do is set your delivery channel to “beta” and then run rpi-eeprom-update
To change the EEPROM delivery channel:
(as noted on the Raspberry Pi EEPROM documentation page)
"But wait - there’s MORE! "
A worthy gentleman, (RonR), on the Raspberry Pi Forms has developed - and maintains - a ncurses-based utility for managing the Pi-4 EEPROM’s.
Viz.:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=283347
If you have a Pi-4, it allows you to update, downgrade, change release channel, etc., and manage the way your Pi handles its EEPROM image without the risk of potentially fatal command-line mistakes as root.
It’s a ZIP file that contains a script, (ncurses based, like raspi-config), that’s a Hot Smokin’ Weapon for your Pi-4.