4 ms·

How about lifespan? I fail to understand why SD card have such a short lifespan, and it's the sole reason I won't acquire an RPi. It seems that the only think

by jokoon 7y ago

How about lifespan? I fail to understand why SD card have such a short lifespan, and it's the sole reason I won't acquire an RPi. It seems that the only think that is lacking on RPi is flash memory storage. Most smartphones have a lot of it, and it seems that 1GB of storage would be enough for the RPi and would not necessarily be so expensive.

gcbw2 7y ago
smartphone batteries will go out much, much sooner than a RPi SD card write-life. And nowadays they are much harder to replace.
- deepspace 7y ago
  That is just not true. I have burned through many a RPi SD card in 3-6 months, while phone batteries last 2 years at minimum.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    What is your use case for the Pi? That’s a very short lifespan.
  - HankB99 7y ago
    And what brand are you buying? FWIW I have several Pis running 24x7 and have not had a single SD card failure. I usually buy high end cards but I also buy cheap cards (4GB cards)and a few Micro-Center house brand, for which I don't know the quality. I've had one that has been running years, I think. Drives a monitor, looping a video where my wife works. The only SD card failure I have experiences was in a camera.
  - erik 7y ago
    In my experience this isn't caused by exhausting the endurance of the flash. It seems like a lot of SD cards have really buggy firmware. And that Linux running on a RPi is particularly prone to triggering these bugs. Industrial SD cards seem to hold up better. Early iterations of the RPi boards apparently had some bad design choices in the power circuitry, which makes the problem worse.
  - ajford 7y ago
    What cards are you using? I have three RPis in abusive conditions, and they haven't had a single SD card issue. Two RPi 3b's running as a car entertainment system, with no form of battery backup/safe shutdown. They are on the ignition power, and once the car turns off, they hard shut down. These have been in place for nearly 2 years with the same Samsung Evo 16GB cards. The other is attached to a digital signage with less frequent hard shut downs, but still has at least one per week, and been in place since late 2017. Also running a Samsung Evo card (I think it's a 32GB since that's what I had on hand). Both have high quality power supplies, which may help. The in-car systems have Anker car USB chargers that have been de-cased and soldered in place, while the signage one has an Anker wall charger and a standard micro-b cable.
    - deepspace 7y ago
      Interesting. The ones that failed were mostly Kingston. I recently switched to Samsung Evo and have not had any failures yet. The failed ones were all running media servers with actual media storage on external drives, but indexing done on the SD card. I ended up aggressively moving write loads to external storage and most of my RPis are running with read-only mounted SD cards these days.
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      What's the write cycle like? Seems like those would mostly be read only. The cards that die quickest for me are either written excessively like a GoPro or Pi based data loggers written constantly. The GoPros are just burning out the cards but the data loggers corrupt the disk images during unexpected power loss.
throw20102010 7y ago
I can't help you with the why some SD cards are short lived, but if you want a longer lasting SD card, try the "endurance" versions. Most of the big brands have a version. They are a bit more expensive, but promise 25x the write life of a standard SD. They are typically marketed toward video surveillance systems and dash cams. I'm not sure how the rest of a Raspberry Pi's performance would be effective.
mafuyu 7y ago
I'd look into industrial SLC uSD cards like the ones from Swissbit: https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/s/swissbit https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/s/swissbit Most consumer cards are designed around media storage so they don't last as long.
rhardih 7y ago
The Pi doesn't necessarily need an SD card. I'm running it on NFS, booted over the network. Works just fine. No need to worry about burning out the SD card.
- sebazzz 7y ago
  What component supports NFS booting? The bootloader is on the SD card, right?
  - mbreese 7y ago
    I believe the RPi can boot directly from the network, but it does require a one-time config change that requires booting from the SD card once. After that, the SD card isn’t required for future reboots. (Or actually even supported, IIRC)
    - geerlingguy 7y ago
      I don't think the Pi 4 supports netboot yet[1]. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
      - mbreese 7y ago
        I should have mentioned that this was currently only for the 3. Hopefully that will get fixed soon.
vardump 7y ago
FWIW, only noname and Sandisk cards have given up the ghost on me. Samsung Pro & Evo cards have been doing just fine. Other than that, you just need to worry about getting proper power. Just use the official power supplies, and you're fine. Also eMMC chips are no magic. There are crappy ones and good ones. Guess which ones you're going to get for little money?
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  Proper power is essential. A phone charger is not a power supply even though it works. I suspect a lot of SD cards are getting undeserved blame from a PSU issue.
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    This is my experience. The only time I had an issue with corruption (using over 60 different microSD cards through 7 years and maybe 50 or so different Raspberry Pis) was when I used a little .5A microSD AC adapter that came with some cheap battery powered device that broke. I have not had any problems when using a reliable power supply. I'm guessing the 'endurance' or 'industrial' cards some people claim are lifesavers are just doing something to guard against flaky power input when doing reads and writes, so it masks the issue.
  - Faark 7y ago
    Not having a proper power supply is my only pi related regret. Thing would freeze every once in a while. That since stopped happening, and the only change in-between (beside updates) was the initial used charger dying.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  I have had SanDisk, Kingston, and Sony cards die on me in a variety of devices from Pis to GoPros. Sonys were the fastest to die but retained read capability, where as the SanDisk just stopped functioning completely. My most recent additions are a Samsung Evo card and a Samsung Endurance. I am curious to see which dies first.
HankB99 7y ago
> ... and it seems that 1GB of storage would be enough for the RPi and would not necessarily be so expensive. Enough for what? A typical Raspbian install not takes a bit more than 4GB. I don't think that the Lite version (no GUI or applications) would fit either. I'd suggest 8GB, if that's a convenient size. As flash density increases, more and more goes on a single chip and that's where production is going. Consider the price of SD cards or USB sticks. Below about 16 or 32GB they don't get much cheaper and I suspect is is for this reason. And IAC, the RPi foundation is working hard to keep the price of the board at $35US so adding something like this probably means something else would have to be eliminated.
- progval 7y ago
  It don't know about Raspbian, but Armbian (headless) fits in 1.2GB

by jokoon 7y ago

gcbw2 7y ago

smartphone batteries will go out much, much sooner than a RPi SD card write-life. And nowadays they are much harder to replace.

deepspace 7y ago
That is just not true. I have burned through many a RPi SD card in 3-6 months, while phone batteries last 2 years at minimum.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  What is your use case for the Pi? That’s a very short lifespan.
- HankB99 7y ago
  And what brand are you buying? FWIW I have several Pis running 24x7 and have not had a single SD card failure. I usually buy high end cards but I also buy cheap cards (4GB cards)and a few Micro-Center house brand, for which I don't know the quality. I've had one that has been running years, I think. Drives a monitor, looping a video where my wife works. The only SD card failure I have experiences was in a camera.
- erik 7y ago
  In my experience this isn't caused by exhausting the endurance of the flash. It seems like a lot of SD cards have really buggy firmware. And that Linux running on a RPi is particularly prone to triggering these bugs. Industrial SD cards seem to hold up better. Early iterations of the RPi boards apparently had some bad design choices in the power circuitry, which makes the problem worse.
- ajford 7y ago
  What cards are you using? I have three RPis in abusive conditions, and they haven't had a single SD card issue. Two RPi 3b's running as a car entertainment system, with no form of battery backup/safe shutdown. They are on the ignition power, and once the car turns off, they hard shut down. These have been in place for nearly 2 years with the same Samsung Evo 16GB cards. The other is attached to a digital signage with less frequent hard shut downs, but still has at least one per week, and been in place since late 2017. Also running a Samsung Evo card (I think it's a 32GB since that's what I had on hand). Both have high quality power supplies, which may help. The in-car systems have Anker car USB chargers that have been de-cased and soldered in place, while the signage one has an Anker wall charger and a standard micro-b cable.
  - deepspace 7y ago
    Interesting. The ones that failed were mostly Kingston. I recently switched to Samsung Evo and have not had any failures yet. The failed ones were all running media servers with actual media storage on external drives, but indexing done on the SD card. I ended up aggressively moving write loads to external storage and most of my RPis are running with read-only mounted SD cards these days.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    What's the write cycle like? Seems like those would mostly be read only. The cards that die quickest for me are either written excessively like a GoPro or Pi based data loggers written constantly. The GoPros are just burning out the cards but the data loggers corrupt the disk images during unexpected power loss.

throw20102010 7y ago

I can't help you with the why some SD cards are short lived, but if you want a longer lasting SD card, try the "endurance" versions. Most of the big brands have a version. They are a bit more expensive, but promise 25x the write life of a standard SD. They are typically marketed toward video surveillance systems and dash cams. I'm not sure how the rest of a Raspberry Pi's performance would be effective.

mafuyu 7y ago

I'd look into industrial SLC uSD cards like the ones from Swissbit: https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/s/swissbit https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/s/swissbit Most consumer cards are designed around media storage so they don't last as long.

rhardih 7y ago

The Pi doesn't necessarily need an SD card. I'm running it on NFS, booted over the network. Works just fine. No need to worry about burning out the SD card.

sebazzz 7y ago
What component supports NFS booting? The bootloader is on the SD card, right?
- mbreese 7y ago
  I believe the RPi can boot directly from the network, but it does require a one-time config change that requires booting from the SD card once. After that, the SD card isn’t required for future reboots. (Or actually even supported, IIRC)
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    I don't think the Pi 4 supports netboot yet[1]. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
    - mbreese 7y ago
      I should have mentioned that this was currently only for the 3. Hopefully that will get fixed soon.

vardump 7y ago

FWIW, only noname and Sandisk cards have given up the ghost on me. Samsung Pro & Evo cards have been doing just fine. Other than that, you just need to worry about getting proper power. Just use the official power supplies, and you're fine. Also eMMC chips are no magic. There are crappy ones and good ones. Guess which ones you're going to get for little money?

blackflame7000 7y ago
Proper power is essential. A phone charger is not a power supply even though it works. I suspect a lot of SD cards are getting undeserved blame from a PSU issue.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  This is my experience. The only time I had an issue with corruption (using over 60 different microSD cards through 7 years and maybe 50 or so different Raspberry Pis) was when I used a little .5A microSD AC adapter that came with some cheap battery powered device that broke. I have not had any problems when using a reliable power supply. I'm guessing the 'endurance' or 'industrial' cards some people claim are lifesavers are just doing something to guard against flaky power input when doing reads and writes, so it masks the issue.
- Faark 7y ago
  Not having a proper power supply is my only pi related regret. Thing would freeze every once in a while. That since stopped happening, and the only change in-between (beside updates) was the initial used charger dying.
cptskippy 7y ago
I have had SanDisk, Kingston, and Sony cards die on me in a variety of devices from Pis to GoPros. Sonys were the fastest to die but retained read capability, where as the SanDisk just stopped functioning completely. My most recent additions are a Samsung Evo card and a Samsung Endurance. I am curious to see which dies first.

HankB99 7y ago

> ... and it seems that 1GB of storage would be enough for the RPi and would not necessarily be so expensive. Enough for what? A typical Raspbian install not takes a bit more than 4GB. I don't think that the Lite version (no GUI or applications) would fit either. I'd suggest 8GB, if that's a convenient size. As flash density increases, more and more goes on a single chip and that's where production is going. Consider the price of SD cards or USB sticks. Below about 16 or 32GB they don't get much cheaper and I suspect is is for this reason. And IAC, the RPi foundation is working hard to keep the price of the board at $35US so adding something like this probably means something else would have to be eliminated.

progval 7y ago
It don't know about Raspbian, but Armbian (headless) fits in 1.2GB