5 ms·

No mention of SD card failure rates? By far one of the biggest shortcomings of pretty much every generation. I'm aware USB boot (only relatively recently) exist

by giobox 8y ago

No mention of SD card failure rates? By far one of the biggest shortcomings of pretty much every generation. I'm aware USB boot (only relatively recently) exists, but this lacks the cheerful simplicity of slotting in a ready-formatted SD card, especially for "appliance" style applications of the Pi.

ozim 8y ago
From my point of view it is covered by whole section about power supplies. SD cards don't magically break because there is something wrong with RPi. They break because you loose power when writing operation is in progress. I have 6 of RPi's and running at home without issues, no sd corruption running 24h for weeks now. But I had a project where we used RPi as kiosk close to 10kv electric motor that was turning on and off periodically. Best power supply dedicated for RPi was not helping there because that was network fluctuation. I got loads of corrupted sd cards at that time.
benj111 8y ago
Yes, there's even an image of an SD card at the bottom?!
- giobox 8y ago
  It's almost like the author forgot to write the section on this...
jpalomaki 8y ago
Would be quite handy if there was a model with built-in SSD level flash storage (8, 16GB or something like that) and option to write the image on that storage by just connecting the device to computer USB port.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Surely that would make the problem worse? Flash storage wears, and is inescapable with current tech. Building it into the device is the worst of both worlds.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Are all problems due to the SD card itself? At least with the RPi 2, I've been having some problems where I need to jiggle the card in the connector to get it to boot, but maybe that was just placebo. It definitely would refuse to boot 90% of the time sometimes.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      I did have that problem with the original pi and it's big sd cards. But never with the micro sd cards. And there were issues with the spring-loaded slots although I've never had issues with that either.
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        Now that you mention it, yes, this problem was almost exclusively with the Pi 2 and the 3 has never given me any such issues.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    "worst of both worlds" is not quite right Some SD cards are unreliable because they are removable storage and some vendors therefore think they can get away with sketchy quality. As soon as you solder on the storage (aka eMMC), reliability requirements shoot up through the roof and vendors tend to do a good job of ensuring quality and reliability. However my suggestion is to just use an external SSD which are dirt cheap compared to SD cards (128GB for 26€).
- markb139 8y ago
  There is. The new compute module has up to 32GB
  - giobox 8y ago
    The compute module isn't really an option for the _vast_ majority of tinkerers buying Pis. It's certainly not a replacement for any of the consumer boards, which all are microSD based. You effectively can't even do anything with the compute module without buying another motherboard to slot it into. It literally has no IO ports beyond a DDR2 SODIMM conector.
- dbuder 8y ago
  I bought an Orange Pi because of this. Generally you load the OS on a SD and copy it over to the eMMC.
colechristensen 8y ago
If you want reliability, get an industrial grade microSD card. Here's a random option: https://www.mouser.com/new/Swissbit/swissbit-industrial-SD-memory/ https://www.mouser.com/new/Swissbit/swissbit-industrial-SD-m...
- vackosar 8y ago
  Do you have experience with it? Do you have link to any data? Why do you think it will improve reliability?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    > Do you have experience with it? I do. > Do you have link to any data? I spent a month plus at work tracking down SD card issues on a high availability project. > Why do you think it will improve reliability? They're made with not bottom of the barrel, failed everything else flash, do stuff like treat MLC as SLC by only putting 00 or 11 into a cell, have controller firmware that's playing significantly fewer games with your data, etc. If you're shipping a product, some of the other things they do like exposing lot codes that mean something, taking bug reports even though you didn't a million units, and exposing internal status counters are really nice.
- imtringued 8y ago
  The 64GB card costs 145€. For 26€ you can get a 128GB SSD that is more reliable than any SD card on the market.
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    I'd love to see the data that backs that claim up. A link to the SSD would be a start. Then start pulling the power out on that thing, even when the filesystem is read-only. And then come back to us with the numbers... Yes, some SSDs have capacitors to let them finish the writes but your dirt cheap one probably won't.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    Like I said it was a random example, there are many options for different models. And yes, the pricing on a microSD is different than an SSD, the SSD is 100 times the weight.
bscphil 8y ago
There's also netboot. It works pretty well and means you never touch flash media at all.
kingosticks 8y ago
Perhaps because that's not specific to the pi and the same issue is present on every SBC (unless you jump up in price dramatically, but you could argue that's the case for the network speed issue, and in fact most of the article).
jon-wood 8y ago
It’s really not that bad if you’re using good quality cards. We’ve got a fleet of about 500 RPi based appliances in the wild, and over the course of a year will see 10 or so card failures - that’s a 2% failure rate. I’m pretty sure we could get it lower than that by doing some fairly minor tweaks to our base image such as sending logs to a tmpfs mount rather than disk.
- alias_neo 8y ago
  I have a Pi running as a WireGuard VPN into my home, to ensure it lasts, given my other SD issues, I made some tweaks to the system, tmpfs for logs and mounted read-only on boot. It's going strong and for updates I just issue a quick remount and I can change what I need.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    Is that a straight forward approach? If you know of a resource about it I'd be interested. I started looking into layered filesystems for that purpose. Treat the main disk as read-only and have a writable layer in RAM that you can periodically commit to disk when desired. But it seemed to be quite cumbersome to setup.
    - alias_neo 8y ago
      It's fairly straightforward if you know what you're doing. I did it myself, I had been meaning to put a blog together about it but never got around to it, you know how these things go. I'm happy to give some pointers or find something that looks suitable when I get home, if you like. Edit: This is pretty close to what I've done with mine: https://petr.io/en/blog/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-with-jessie/ https://petr.io/en/blog/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-wi... When I need to update I just run the remount command (IMPORTANT: on both /boot and /), make your changes, perform your updates, clean up the apt cache, then remount read-only or just reboot.
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        I'm concerned that as density increases and TLC (and QLC) sd cards become the norm, the controllers will be forced to implement read-levelling as most SSDs already do. Once that happens, even your read-only filesystem is going to start doing writes and then we are back to square one.
alias_neo 8y ago
This is one of the biggest issues outside of power supplies that I've had, I've got 10+ Pi's now, one of them in particular has chewed through SanDisk cards, sadly they'll not replace them under warranty unless you send them back. The issue with that is the cards fail read-only and I won't send back cards with private data on. I asked them if I can destroy the card first and they said no, because they have to test it in order to honour the warranty. I moved the critical box (my home automation) to a NUC, the other Pi's are still doing fine.

by giobox 8y ago

ozim 8y ago

From my point of view it is covered by whole section about power supplies. SD cards don't magically break because there is something wrong with RPi. They break because you loose power when writing operation is in progress. I have 6 of RPi's and running at home without issues, no sd corruption running 24h for weeks now. But I had a project where we used RPi as kiosk close to 10kv electric motor that was turning on and off periodically. Best power supply dedicated for RPi was not helping there because that was network fluctuation. I got loads of corrupted sd cards at that time.

benj111 8y ago

Yes, there's even an image of an SD card at the bottom?!

giobox 8y ago
It's almost like the author forgot to write the section on this...

jpalomaki 8y ago

Would be quite handy if there was a model with built-in SSD level flash storage (8, 16GB or something like that) and option to write the image on that storage by just connecting the device to computer USB port.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Surely that would make the problem worse? Flash storage wears, and is inescapable with current tech. Building it into the device is the worst of both worlds.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Are all problems due to the SD card itself? At least with the RPi 2, I've been having some problems where I need to jiggle the card in the connector to get it to boot, but maybe that was just placebo. It definitely would refuse to boot 90% of the time sometimes.
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    I did have that problem with the original pi and it's big sd cards. But never with the micro sd cards. And there were issues with the spring-loaded slots although I've never had issues with that either.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Now that you mention it, yes, this problem was almost exclusively with the Pi 2 and the 3 has never given me any such issues.
- imtringued 8y ago
  "worst of both worlds" is not quite right Some SD cards are unreliable because they are removable storage and some vendors therefore think they can get away with sketchy quality. As soon as you solder on the storage (aka eMMC), reliability requirements shoot up through the roof and vendors tend to do a good job of ensuring quality and reliability. However my suggestion is to just use an external SSD which are dirt cheap compared to SD cards (128GB for 26€).
markb139 8y ago
There is. The new compute module has up to 32GB
- giobox 8y ago
  The compute module isn't really an option for the _vast_ majority of tinkerers buying Pis. It's certainly not a replacement for any of the consumer boards, which all are microSD based. You effectively can't even do anything with the compute module without buying another motherboard to slot it into. It literally has no IO ports beyond a DDR2 SODIMM conector.
dbuder 8y ago
I bought an Orange Pi because of this. Generally you load the OS on a SD and copy it over to the eMMC.

colechristensen 8y ago

If you want reliability, get an industrial grade microSD card. Here's a random option: https://www.mouser.com/new/Swissbit/swissbit-industrial-SD-memory/ https://www.mouser.com/new/Swissbit/swissbit-industrial-SD-m...

vackosar 8y ago
Do you have experience with it? Do you have link to any data? Why do you think it will improve reliability?
- monocasa 8y ago
  > Do you have experience with it? I do. > Do you have link to any data? I spent a month plus at work tracking down SD card issues on a high availability project. > Why do you think it will improve reliability? They're made with not bottom of the barrel, failed everything else flash, do stuff like treat MLC as SLC by only putting 00 or 11 into a cell, have controller firmware that's playing significantly fewer games with your data, etc. If you're shipping a product, some of the other things they do like exposing lot codes that mean something, taking bug reports even though you didn't a million units, and exposing internal status counters are really nice.
imtringued 8y ago
The 64GB card costs 145€. For 26€ you can get a 128GB SSD that is more reliable than any SD card on the market.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  I'd love to see the data that backs that claim up. A link to the SSD would be a start. Then start pulling the power out on that thing, even when the filesystem is read-only. And then come back to us with the numbers... Yes, some SSDs have capacitors to let them finish the writes but your dirt cheap one probably won't.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Like I said it was a random example, there are many options for different models. And yes, the pricing on a microSD is different than an SSD, the SSD is 100 times the weight.

bscphil 8y ago

There's also netboot. It works pretty well and means you never touch flash media at all.

kingosticks 8y ago

Perhaps because that's not specific to the pi and the same issue is present on every SBC (unless you jump up in price dramatically, but you could argue that's the case for the network speed issue, and in fact most of the article).

jon-wood 8y ago

It’s really not that bad if you’re using good quality cards. We’ve got a fleet of about 500 RPi based appliances in the wild, and over the course of a year will see 10 or so card failures - that’s a 2% failure rate. I’m pretty sure we could get it lower than that by doing some fairly minor tweaks to our base image such as sending logs to a tmpfs mount rather than disk.

alias_neo 8y ago
I have a Pi running as a WireGuard VPN into my home, to ensure it lasts, given my other SD issues, I made some tweaks to the system, tmpfs for logs and mounted read-only on boot. It's going strong and for updates I just issue a quick remount and I can change what I need.
- tjoff 8y ago
  Is that a straight forward approach? If you know of a resource about it I'd be interested. I started looking into layered filesystems for that purpose. Treat the main disk as read-only and have a writable layer in RAM that you can periodically commit to disk when desired. But it seemed to be quite cumbersome to setup.
  - alias_neo 8y ago
    It's fairly straightforward if you know what you're doing. I did it myself, I had been meaning to put a blog together about it but never got around to it, you know how these things go. I'm happy to give some pointers or find something that looks suitable when I get home, if you like. Edit: This is pretty close to what I've done with mine: https://petr.io/en/blog/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-with-jessie/ https://petr.io/en/blog/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-wi... When I need to update I just run the remount command (IMPORTANT: on both /boot and /), make your changes, perform your updates, clean up the apt cache, then remount read-only or just reboot.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      I'm concerned that as density increases and TLC (and QLC) sd cards become the norm, the controllers will be forced to implement read-levelling as most SSDs already do. Once that happens, even your read-only filesystem is going to start doing writes and then we are back to square one.

alias_neo 8y ago

This is one of the biggest issues outside of power supplies that I've had, I've got 10+ Pi's now, one of them in particular has chewed through SanDisk cards, sadly they'll not replace them under warranty unless you send them back. The issue with that is the cards fail read-only and I won't send back cards with private data on. I asked them if I can destroy the card first and they said no, because they have to test it in order to honour the warranty. I moved the critical box (my home automation) to a NUC, the other Pi's are still doing fine.