5 ms·

For most use cases, SD cards on Raspberry Pi's are not reliable enough. I realize you may be successful in running signage devices, but most people want to sim

by sgt 8y ago

For most use cases, SD cards on Raspberry Pi's are not reliable enough. I realize you may be successful in running signage devices, but most people want to simply be able to run common class 10 card (e.g. from Verbatim, Kingston, Sandisk), using a standard OS setup and leave the Pi running without having it corrupting your files. This simply isn't possible, in my experience. Also look at the OpenHAB forums as a reference. The more regular disk activity, the worse it gets. We went this route in our office and every 3-6 months we had corruption on each of many dozen Pi's. Once we switched to using USB drives (spinning or SSD) the issues were sorted out.

bradfa 8y ago
Cheap SD cards are going to return less than desirable results. Higher quality cards such as SanDisk Ultra Mobile or Samsung Pro series should last quite a while when used as a normal "disk" on a system like this. As an added benefit, using a card like a Samsung Pro will also get you MUCH better file system speed for both reads and writes on common Linux file systems like ext4. The controller inside a Samsung Pro series card is much more advanced than run of the mill cheap Kingston cards. If you really need durability, there's also a handful of SLC (single level cell) SD cards on the market which will last an order of magnitude longer in terms of writes as compared to consumer level MLC/TLC cards. SLC cards aren't cheap but you get what you pay for.
- monocasa 8y ago
  > Higher quality cards such as SanDisk Ultra Mobile or Samsung Pro series should last quite a while when used as a normal "disk" on a system like this. Nope, it's mainly marketing. Cards from those brands are fundamentally not great for sub million unit purchases. We tried to use some for the root fs for a fairly high availability appliance. If you don't want one in twenty going out in a month (and we figured out a way to make them go out after 8kb/s for 8 hours with a specific access pattern without power drops), then you need 'industrial SD cards'. They'll treat you like adults when it comes to support, will have lot codes that actually map to internal changes, etc. Trying to sell a product with consumer SD cards (yes, even the ones that call themselves 'Pro') is basically a futile exercise.
mschuster91 8y ago
> but most people want to simply be able to run common class 10 card (e.g. from Verbatim, Kingston, Sandisk), using a standard OS setup and leave the Pi running without having it corrupting your file To be fair: try the same with cellphones. I have a shitload of micro-SD cards gone bad on me, and yes genuine SanDisk not cheap fakes off of Amazon. microSD cards are the cheapest crappy flash chips you can get with a microcontroller strapped in front for error correction.
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  I don't even put SD cards in my phones anymore due to corruption. I always got the best SanDisk's I could find. Luckily my Pi that runs probably 8 hours/week hasn't failed, but I have the drive imaged just in case.

by sgt 8y ago

bradfa 8y ago

Cheap SD cards are going to return less than desirable results. Higher quality cards such as SanDisk Ultra Mobile or Samsung Pro series should last quite a while when used as a normal "disk" on a system like this. As an added benefit, using a card like a Samsung Pro will also get you MUCH better file system speed for both reads and writes on common Linux file systems like ext4. The controller inside a Samsung Pro series card is much more advanced than run of the mill cheap Kingston cards. If you really need durability, there's also a handful of SLC (single level cell) SD cards on the market which will last an order of magnitude longer in terms of writes as compared to consumer level MLC/TLC cards. SLC cards aren't cheap but you get what you pay for.

monocasa 8y ago
> Higher quality cards such as SanDisk Ultra Mobile or Samsung Pro series should last quite a while when used as a normal "disk" on a system like this. Nope, it's mainly marketing. Cards from those brands are fundamentally not great for sub million unit purchases. We tried to use some for the root fs for a fairly high availability appliance. If you don't want one in twenty going out in a month (and we figured out a way to make them go out after 8kb/s for 8 hours with a specific access pattern without power drops), then you need 'industrial SD cards'. They'll treat you like adults when it comes to support, will have lot codes that actually map to internal changes, etc. Trying to sell a product with consumer SD cards (yes, even the ones that call themselves 'Pro') is basically a futile exercise.

mschuster91 8y ago

> but most people want to simply be able to run common class 10 card (e.g. from Verbatim, Kingston, Sandisk), using a standard OS setup and leave the Pi running without having it corrupting your file To be fair: try the same with cellphones. I have a shitload of micro-SD cards gone bad on me, and yes genuine SanDisk not cheap fakes off of Amazon. microSD cards are the cheapest crappy flash chips you can get with a microcontroller strapped in front for error correction.

H1Supreme 8y ago
I don't even put SD cards in my phones anymore due to corruption. I always got the best SanDisk's I could find. Luckily my Pi that runs probably 8 hours/week hasn't failed, but I have the drive imaged just in case.