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Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

Over the years I've used Raspberry Pis as little media players, but they kept burning out every 3-4 months; the card reader (their SSD) wouldn't work, or they'd just blink some other error message. I thought they were just cheaply made ($35 after all). Anyway, long story short, I got a fan and the last one has been working for over a year without issues.

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SD cards have a limited number of writes so if you have the OS constantly writing to it then eventually it sets itself read-only.

You can mitigate this somewhat with https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

With some finagling you can get them to boot an OS from an external disk then your SD card can just hold a read-only boot loader.

Heat causes flash memory to fail faster.

I couldn't find a good source that quantifies the effect, but this mentions it: https://www.atpinc.com/blog/ssd-data-retention-temperature-t...

What I saw is that half the time the card was still good, if I put it into another RPi, and half the time the card and the reader were both shot.

PLUS: You can get MicroSD card file system corruption if not using industrial grade MicroSD cards - especially when losing the power...

I believe this is mainly down to the FAT16/ FAT32 filesystem on the SD cards. Those filesystems have never been particularly reliable, when those were the dominant hard drive formats, MANY users back then lost data (and backing up to floppy had its own set of issues).

This is why you have to unmount USB drives, if you pull the drive while data is still in cache would also create problems. The difference is when copying files to the drives, it's sequential, you may lose a file or two. When it's the OS using it as the main drive there are loads of write operations going on.

At least it's easier to add battery backup to a Pi then most other computers.

> I believe this is mainly down to the FAT16/ FAT32 filesystem on the SD cards.

Well I lost some to power failure, and they all had ext4 on it. Anecdotal I know, but I'll be avoiding RPi for anything that needs to persist data in the future.

In the past when I was using a rasppi (v1) as my media player, I used the SD card only for booting off of. The media files themselves were persisted on my nas, served over nfs. Using network storage really seems like the way to go, particularly now that the shared bus issue has been resolved. At the very least, real hard drives are much more efficient (byte/dollar) than SD cards.

The microSD card in a Raspberry Pi uses an ext4 filesystem, not FAT.

The root partition is ext4, while the boot partition is FAT; plug it into a windows machine and it just sees the boot part, so people assume the whole thing is FAT

Also if you are not using a good power supply the Pi will happily operate on less current except when it needs that current during power-intensive operations like watching a movie. This could be causing silent corruption as it happened in my case. If you ever see a thunderbolt symbol best check your power supply.

What are you guys using since you're talking about symbols?

Should be a part of the PIs firmware.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/warn...

It's part of the default desktop UI in Raspbian.

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