Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> This means you can run the Pi with a read-only root filesystem, which will dramatically increase the SD card’s lifetime.

I can't find an authoritative source, but some quick Googling brings up websites like Reddit and Stackexchange saying that SD cards have ~100,000 lifetime write cycles. I feel like it would be hard to exhaust that.

Is this a real problem people experience?

View on HN

I haven't had an issue with SD cards where Pis had reliable power. Where I used to live though we had frequent power cuts, of only a couple of seconds, a couple of times a day. SD card corruption was a major pain. Even in areas with more reliable power, for a 24/7 on device, occasional power outages have lead me to move away from Pis. Battery backups are, of course, an option, but increase the cost for a reliable and simple system.

Yes, it's not particularly hard to wear out an SD card (especially a cheap, high-densite one), with just the wear of writing logs. It does vary a lot depending on what exactly you are going, but it's a fairly commonly reported failure among raspberry pi users.

Yes, as someone who shipped embedded systems running off of SD cards, it's a real problem.

It's not the flash endurance you hit typically, but bugs in the card firmware that cause the FTL to completely lose it's mind. Yes, even with supposedly quality brands.

About the only way I found to deal with the problem is to use "industrial" SD cards that are a little slower and pretty expensive, but the firmware takes less liberties in the name of specious benchmarks.

It’s interesting. In my embedded experience, SD cards are absolute trash, eMMC is already much better, raw NAND is somewhere in between and then actual SSDs are much better than all of these again. Yet supposedly these are all the same basic building blocks.

Yea, it's a real issue. Search for "raspberry pi dead SD card" to found report of ppl which have failing SD card every month or more often.

Most of those tend to be power issues.

It is, but mostly due to logging to disk instead of RAM.

That’s what setting a read-only root file system prevents in a roundabout way, so people have started to misidentify it as the solution.

It was a plague for years where power failure during a write would cause an SD card to go read only or worse.

A lot of people also run them with a power supply that will undervolt, switched to ones with more amps and haven't had issues since

My website is on a pi-4 and hasn't had a hiccup in 4 years. So far, the SD-card has worked great.

How high of traffic is your website? And are you writing log files (like nginx or apache, plus application if applicable)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com