4 ms·

I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reve

I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reverting my code changes. That and the lack of hardware clock hampering some of the diagnostic tools I usually use, kept me sticking with VMs on a NUC and a fanless Celeron for Kodi for my main compute uses. In time I have gotten more Pis, but mainly for hardware aided projects such as the Pidp/8: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 The rejuvenated Nabaztag: https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ The seasonal Xmas tree hat: https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi And a Mycroft Mark I: https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ which is Pi based inside and the only one these projects which is always powered on. The 4 seems like it may finally have the horsepower to make me try to give it a go again and possibly replace my various x86 pucks as they age out.

avh02 7y ago
oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks. I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart. Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old system. PSA: Bad SD card can make you feel crazy.
- wil421 7y ago
  The SD card was failing to write? It would have blown my mind if I reinstalled raspbian and the old config popped up. I’ll have to keep this in mind.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I had an SD card once that would not fail to write (i.e. kernel does not show write errors) but when you read back it gets the old data. Tried it on multiple operating systems with the same behavior. It was a more expensive SD card because I see more issues with cheap ones. But it seems to me that SD cards suck at all price brackets. Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit?
    - mark-r 7y ago
      > Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit? You get a lot more money counterfeiting the expensive ones than the cheap ones.
    - kolp 7y ago
      In my experience, Sandisk have a much better warranty policy than the other cards that have failed on me. RMAs get approved, UPS prepaid sticker for return, and replacement sent by UPS (in Europe, at least). The failure rate of their cards doesn't seem different than others I've used.
    - corrigible 7y ago
      Did you buy the SD card from Amazon or Ebay?
    - invsblduck 7y ago
      Great read https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
  - zantana 7y ago
    Yes in my case the pi would crash, and the SD card changes would revert. I don't know if its changed or not, but at the time you couldn't check uptime because the lack of a hardware clock meant it didn't know the time when it booted. It took a while to figure out it was crashing everyday, probably due to the bad card, and the writes weren't taking. After more recent problems with other SD cards I'm trying the new SanDisk 8GB MSDHC Class 10 UHS-I U1 Industrial MLC micro cards after seeing them mentioned here.
    - Crontab 7y ago
      That's like groundhog day.
- phaedrus 7y ago
  I had a Neo Freerunner (2008ish time frame). So many SD card vendors ship (or shipped, then) bad/broken/out of spec SD cards whose controllers just barely work on Windows, Linux distros' drivers didn't work around the quirks, and probably the Freerunner SD port wasn't that great electrically. End result 8 out of 10 SD cards wouldn't work at all and one of the remaining two would fail silently later. I have still have a little box full of microSD cards.
dws 7y ago
That 'appearing to take writes but reverting on restart' thing drove me nuts. Switched to Samsung Evo Plus SD cards. A year later, all good.
- tamiral 7y ago
  I use the samsung evo plus cards all the time and knock wood haven't had any issues.
nicoburns 7y ago
Seems like a small capacity ssd over usb would be a good idea...
- imtringued 7y ago
  Yeah and they are cheaper than the SD card brands known for reliability.

avh02 7y ago

oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks. I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart. Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old system. PSA: Bad SD card can make you feel crazy.

wil421 7y ago
The SD card was failing to write? It would have blown my mind if I reinstalled raspbian and the old config popped up. I’ll have to keep this in mind.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I had an SD card once that would not fail to write (i.e. kernel does not show write errors) but when you read back it gets the old data. Tried it on multiple operating systems with the same behavior. It was a more expensive SD card because I see more issues with cheap ones. But it seems to me that SD cards suck at all price brackets. Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit?
  - mark-r 7y ago
    > Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit? You get a lot more money counterfeiting the expensive ones than the cheap ones.
  - kolp 7y ago
    In my experience, Sandisk have a much better warranty policy than the other cards that have failed on me. RMAs get approved, UPS prepaid sticker for return, and replacement sent by UPS (in Europe, at least). The failure rate of their cards doesn't seem different than others I've used.
  - corrigible 7y ago
    Did you buy the SD card from Amazon or Ebay?
  - invsblduck 7y ago
    Great read https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
- zantana 7y ago
  Yes in my case the pi would crash, and the SD card changes would revert. I don't know if its changed or not, but at the time you couldn't check uptime because the lack of a hardware clock meant it didn't know the time when it booted. It took a while to figure out it was crashing everyday, probably due to the bad card, and the writes weren't taking. After more recent problems with other SD cards I'm trying the new SanDisk 8GB MSDHC Class 10 UHS-I U1 Industrial MLC micro cards after seeing them mentioned here.
  - Crontab 7y ago
    That's like groundhog day.
phaedrus 7y ago
I had a Neo Freerunner (2008ish time frame). So many SD card vendors ship (or shipped, then) bad/broken/out of spec SD cards whose controllers just barely work on Windows, Linux distros' drivers didn't work around the quirks, and probably the Freerunner SD port wasn't that great electrically. End result 8 out of 10 SD cards wouldn't work at all and one of the remaining two would fail silently later. I have still have a little box full of microSD cards.

dws 7y ago

That 'appearing to take writes but reverting on restart' thing drove me nuts. Switched to Samsung Evo Plus SD cards. A year later, all good.

tamiral 7y ago
I use the samsung evo plus cards all the time and knock wood haven't had any issues.

nicoburns 7y ago

Seems like a small capacity ssd over usb would be a good idea...

imtringued 7y ago
Yeah and they are cheaper than the SD card brands known for reliability.