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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

Now if anyone had a problem to my problem with Raspberry Pi: that it eats through SD cards like nothing else I have owned.

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Are you letting it swap? SD cards come in all quality levels, and some have trouble being written constantly.

My experience is that the microSD last for a really long time, while the SD ones died like fries.

Three solutions:

1. Use an "endurance" SD card, usually sold for dashcams.

2. Use a USB stick instead of an SD card.

3. Netboot from a TFTP/NTP server.

For #2, I’d run it on a USB extension cable.

The thermal images in the link still show whatever is plugged into USB runs pretty hot.

I did of course mean "NFS" and not "NTP".

Other than breaking a couple of cards by opening the cases without removing them first, I haven't had any serious trouble with them.

But I do disable all logging and swap in the hope that this will extend their lifetimes.

Wouldn't that be a problem with what you're running on the pi and how it uses the card? Or is it not a use thing and it's actually frying the cards somehow?

SD cards can die within a few months through repeated power cycling, or writing logs to disk instead of to RAM. There are techniques that one can use to lengthen SD card life, but the average person buying a Pi and slapping a media-center distro on there might not know about them or be willing to e.g. invest in an UPS and use the command line to hack logging.

Yeah, I know about wear leveling and maximum writes, which is why I mentioned what you rub on the pi. These days anything meant to be a device os that doesn't make allowances for the non-vilatile memory it will likely be running in (even if just the base is and not media mounts) as needed in some way is really doing users a disservice.

The power cycling is new to me though. Is that also based on bad defaults (e.g. not using noatime mount option etc.) or is it actually based on power? Because that seems weird given their designed use case (constantly getting and losing power as they go in and out of devices).

I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/

While the logging issue might be solved on LibreELEC, writes to the Kodi database can be just as bad in the near long-term.

log2ram and fanotify are really handy to extend their lives.

It's generally a power supply issue. Either get a better PSU or alternatively a UPS.

Have you tried setting up your Raspberry Pi to boot from USB memory?

1. Use good quality cards

2. /tmp on tmpfs

You're welcome.

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