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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

Hey, about the raspberry pi, I have had a bunch of problems with it eating the micro SD cards, like they fail in six months or an year tops. I had countered this for some little time by using it to boot and relaying to a hdd. How are you handling this? Is there some special micro SD card that doesn't fail as soon?

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There are different types of flash storage:

  * SLC - 1 bit per electrical cell
  * MLC - 2 bits per cell
  * TLC - 3 bits per cell
  * QLC - 4 bits per cell

You need SLC cards if you really want something to be long-lasting. You can find some at specialty places like Digikey, or labeled as "Industrial" in normal channels (i.e. Amazon sells both Kingston and Samsung 8GB industrial cards).

They are both smaller capacity and more expensive, though.

Also, if you're using a stock distribution not intended for a Pi, you probably have quite a lot of logs/etc churning, which can be cleaned up. If you aren't doing much with the Pi except a few common services, check out DietPi.

DietPi is an optimal choice, I agree. Especially for building a server.

Thank you so much, I didn't knew about this! Also on DietPi it's pretty cool and apparently it has also builds for x86 so I can easily play with it in a VM for experimenting! Thanks for this!

Standard flash disks use wear leveling - which is not normally present on micro SD cards. Have a look at the SD cards that are designed for dash cams, body cams and industrial applications

SanDisk used FTL (flash translation layer, wear leveling) on their SD cards at least way back in 2013. Single MLC block survived about 500 erases. FAT would kill it immediately otherwise.

I went down that rabbit hole a few years ago. Many cards don't tolerate sudden power loss while writes are happening.

The solution I found was these ATP micro SD cards (looks like the prices have increased like 3x though...) where the firmware is specifically designed to tolerate abuse:

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/industria...

Perhaps there are other cheaper but still robust alternatives now?

From what I've read, the power supply can make a big difference here, in addition to getting quality microSD cards.

I've had a Pi Hole running on the same microSD for 6-7 years now with only one hiccup (and that was a software thing - a fresh install got it back up and running on the same microSD). It just has a regular SD card (not a high endurance one), but the power supply came from adafruit, and it's been connected to a UPS for most of its life.

The good power supply is a good thing, I used old Samsung USB chargers, I imagine they deliver an ok quality, but perhaps not as much as a phone has a big battery that can work as "big capacitor"/filter of sorts. The UPS is a good idea too, I probably need one here and power going out where I live is something that does happen occasionally.

I am running 2 Raspberry Pis 24/7 for many years. Never had a micro SD fail.

I noticed the same for certain cards. Are you getting genuine SanDisk? There are lots of counterfeits out there.

That's a good thing to check. I honestly don't know if the SanDisk micro SD cards I got are genuine - they look their part and have that plastic square thing that is placed inside the paper thing with SanDisk brand and all the numbers, but maybe the fake ones have caught up in their packaging. I have no idea how to make sure it's genuine though.

I think it should also have the shiny metallic sticker. There's probably a verification guide online somewhere

Try to use DietPI or RAM logs, I’m using it since years and years without any sd card failure.

They make "high endurance " sd cards, typically marketed for dash cam use.

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