Hacker News Reader

Comment by zikduruqe | Hacker News Reader

> it will kill the card from IO cycles.

It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure.

YMMV and all that.

View on HN

HA in particular creates a lot of log churn. It's not a 100% certainty, but after running for 4 years I finally had to copy the SD image to a new one because it had become unwritable.

Dirty power kills my raspis faster then write cycles. I've been really surprised with the stability once I moved by Pis to my UPS

Yeah, I haven't had issues with SD cards in a long time. Many years ago (maybe 10), I think they weren't quite as good and I probably skimped too much when buying a card. RPi 1 also had power regulation issues. Now I only use higher tier cards and make sure there's enough free space for wear leveling and operations.

My friend bought an ODROID and an SD card at the recommendation of some tech YouTuber for Home Assistant. Within 3 years the SD card was dead, and I had to help him re-set-up all of his stuff (this time, with a more resilient storage medium and remote backups).

YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.

I wouldn't put running a weather station in the same class of disk activity as running Home Assistant. It is writing a fairly large amount of logs, plus statistics for every attribute/sensor for every device. The more devices you have, the more you will be writing.

There are regularly threads from people with "I restarted HA and now I get this weird boot error message", and it's because their SD card died.

You do you, but it's common enough of a problem that I think it's worth calling out as a "Don't do this".

I run HA on another RPi, so I am familiar.

On the weather station I wrote to the SD card 1,068,266 database records, along with all the nginx logs, etc...

> it's common enough of a problem

It's probably survivorship bias, where everyone complains about SD card corruption, while those with no issues really don't say anything. Well, except my comments today.

Fair point on survivorship bias. But, I think SD card being flash memory is technically expected to fail over time, with that failure compounded by the number of write cycles. These cycles are a spec of the SD card. If a section/page of the flash is being overwritten more frequently than the other, then surely it'll fail faster than an SD card whose erase/write cycles are distributed uniformly across all the sections/pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com