Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Reliable? 0. Sdcards are not reliable

I was using one for filming a client job the other day, without a backup card. It cracked and bent in half and I thought I was going to have to entirely reshoot the location. Bent it back and put it in the laptop and got all the data fine. Never had one fail.

If you've never had one fail you haven't used them enough. Raspberry Pi usage seem to be pretty efficient at sorting the good ones from the bad ones

I've been using RPIs since their first release and never had an SD card failure. Might just be luck though cause I know the problem is real and happens to many people.

It depends on the distro. What especially hammers SD cards on Linux, eventually rendering the card read-only, is logs being written to disk. A lot of distros for Raspberry Pi therefore now keep logs in RAM.

This issue is true of any flash memory. See my sibling comment on using an USB stick to write data: I also destroyed a bunch with logs

I destroyed many SD cards with the original Pi. I ended up putting the card read only with the hardware switch and use a USB stick for writing data. No issue with microSD cards with more recent Pis (or other SBC) however

Exactly my experience. They work five until they don’t.

Not risking my data nor tribe in those things anymore even though I love that they’re small and cheap. Ideal for large media which doesn’t require too much bandwidth.

tribe=time

> It cracked and bent in half

You cracked and bent a microSD card? How did that happen?

Chewbacca

I'm surprised there aren't adapters to connect two or more micro SD cards to one device and duplicate written data to both of them. I assume you couldn't do it with wiring alone, and would need a chip in there.

Even finding a microSD extension was tricky when I wanted to mess about with the hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com