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Comment by ticks | Hacker News Reader

I have only recently started looking at the Raspberry Pi, one thing that struck me was the use of SD memory for storage... I have used USB sticks to boot Linux before and they only lasted a few months of continuous use. Perhaps I'm missing something? Other than that I'm impressed, the device has lots of potential.

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Don't use a swap partition. That's typically the cause of early flash death. I have an old EeePC 901, with 12GB of onboard flash - it's still going after 2-3 years of relatively heavy use.

Not swapping and getting rid of Linux's ridiculously noisy (for a personal laptop) and duplicative logs and perhaps mounting with "-o noatime" will help a lot as well.

Additionally, the SDD in your 901 isn't just a hunk of flash - it contains additional logic that will perform Wear Leveling on the physical flash modules, resulting in more write cycles before you see a failure. (Higher-capacity thumb drives also have wear levelers to fight against the OS's propensity to always allocate data sectors in the same order, but they're a different variety than those found in SSDs, from what I've read)

You can always plug in a USB mass storage device and use the SD card as a readonly root FS, or even just /boot. And that's if the raspi can't boot straight from USB.

That said my NSLU2 has been running Debian for years on a 2GB USB stick, swap included. There are a few Linux knobs you can turn to reduce writes a bit.

"And that's if the raspi can't boot straight from USB."

FAQ says it can not.

I've been booting with old USB sticks for years, not to mention cheap microSD cards. I'm still waiting for one to stop working. What sticks are you using? Are you booting with the stick mounted rw? Are you mounting your userland in RAM?

The board is designed so that all the peripherals are likely to just be lying around - a spare SD card, a cell phone charger, an old TV if you don't have a monitor handy, etc.

My old monitor doesn't have HDMI input. Reading text through the composite out on a old TV is painful. They should have used a gpu with DVI-I output, so that it would have digital and analog (VGA) output pins, in my opinion. Nevertheless I'm waiting for mine to arrive :)

Here you go, less than $5 including shipping :) https://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?p_id=2029

I have one of those, but the Rpi HDMI doesn't have analog pins, afaik, which precludes its use with older LCD monitors with only a VGA (analog) input, which was what I meant initially, sorry if I didn't make myself clear.

Oh, I just assumed that it had some digital input (DVI-D at least).

HDMI is compatible with DVI. You can convert from DVI to HDMI and vice versa (without requiring logic, simply hooking the right lines into the right port).

HDMI = DVI + audio.

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