8 ms·
Schools don't want to be debugging microSD and USB issues.
by qz2 6y ago
Schools don't want to be debugging microSD and USB issues.
- krageon 6y agoExcept these problems don't occur for most people, as evidenced by the fact that the current system works fine. Complaints like yours are relatively rare.
- qz2 6y agoRubbish. They do. My daughter's school has a pile of knackered Pi's that the teachers don't have the time and budget to fix. Broken connectors, duff microSDs, bricks. They don't use them now, preferring python on windows.
- chaos_a 6y agosounds like people simply weren't taking any care of them, that's why they broke. If they had cases and decent sd cards that probably wouldn't have happened.
- qz2 6y agoSchool computers take a beating. That's why the two are incompatible.
- rbanffy 6y agoThat's one of the reasons the Apple II was so popular with schools. It was built like a tank.
- conjectures 6y agoToo many kids, that's the problem with schools these days.
- jon-wood 6y agoI’m responsible for a fleet of a few hundred Raspberry Pis being used as home monitoring hubs - they use high grade SD cards, and are configured to write as little as possible while still fulfilling their function, yet we still see one or two a month fall of the internet because of SD card corruption. This is absolutely a problem. I believe the compute module is somewhat better in that it uses eMMC rather than SD cards.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoCorrect me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t eMMC literally just an embedded SD card?
- cvakiitho 6y agoIt is, and it is better because it probably has better chips, but it will die, and brick RPi in the future.
- avian 6y agoAs someone who has also worked with fleets of devices (R.Pi-based and others) working off SD-cards, I can confirm what jon-wood is saying. For some reason SD cards fail at a much higher rate than eMMC flash chips in traditional SMT packages.
- makomk 6y agoSame interface as an SD card, but better firmware and probably higher quality flash. SD cards are really aggressively cost-cut, often coming in than less than the price of raw flash of the same capacity.
- lmns 6y agoSD cards with wear leveling and error correction are hard to find and can easily be more expensive than similar SSDs.
- kingosticks 6y agoI was under the impression most non-awful SD cards had some sort of wear-leveling these days but there's no standard for it so they don't advertise it on the front like SSDs. I couldn't really find any proof either-way about this, just a few instances of people looking into it: - https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/27619/is-it-true-that-a-sd-mmc-card-does-wear-levelling-with-its-own-controller https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/27619/is-it-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_reminder_that_sd_cards_with_wearleveling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_...
- numpad0 6y agoI think every microSD and USB sticks by now has WL across the board, especially at awful grade. WL and ECC are must at current [price, BER, capacity, bit-per-cell] or something.
- lmns 6y agoWith USB sticks it's a different story. There are some manufacturers like Sandisk who claim they use wear leveling in all of their current USB sticks. microSD is a mess in this regard. Wear leveling is less common there and only present in very specific and expensive niche models.
- krageon 6y agoI'm sure your experiences are legitimate, just like mine for similar usage profiles are. My only conclusion can be that it's not the hardware itself that's the problem, unless we allow for the possibility that it's different batching. Unlikely, but not unthinkable.
- deeringc 6y agoBut we've already established that these are meant for "the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools and in developing countries". In these situations with young, untrained hands, durability and robustness are absolutely key criteria. It's not good value if it ends up discarded/broken due to additional complexity or a fault.
- krageon 6y agoI did mention "similar usage profiles"
- throwaway894345 6y agoOr maybe you're using Pis in ways that aren't so hard on SD cards, etc? It seems very likely that this is the case given that these users experience these issues on Pis but not other systems.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoProbably as the pi was designed for 6th formers to use - letting 8-10 year olds lose on them :-)
- qz2 6y agoNo all GCSE so 14+ students. The issue is usually that they freeze or crash under "desktop use" all the time and people pull the power out and back in again to reset them. This flexes the HDMI and USB connectors which eventually break or the cables give out. During the reboot cycle is when the SD card gets borked, or randomly suddenly. It's really a terrible computing experience compared to using a simple off the shelf windows box running python with full single-sign-on to GCPW. They don't crash and the cables are never yanked around because they are AIO boxes and the storage never goes wonky. Teachers prefer them because the first 30 minutes of a 80 minute slot isn't getting 30 raspberry pi's limping again.
- ddalex 6y agoThese are classic symptoms of underpowered PIs. 99% of USB power supplies are not fit for a PI :(
- qz2 6y agoYeah see my original comment about USB power problems :)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoSo that raises the question: Why do they keep making Pis with USB power? One could argue that it's because USB power supplies are cheap and ubiquitous, but that's not really true if only 1% of power supplies are actually capable of properly powering a Pi. They could use a different power connector that doesn't cause this confusion, or they could design Pis to use less power and therefore work properly with more USB power supplies.
- derefr 6y ago
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoTell them to give them to me. I'll pay for S&H
- derefr 6y ago> duff microSDs Do you mean the microSD cards tend to wear out, or that they’re DOA? If the former — I’m pretty sure there’s an option to load RaspberryOS into a RAM-resident mode (like a live CD) where regular OS usage won’t hit the disk at all, and only a “Local Documents” partition is mounted writable, with nothing configured to implicitly write to it by default. If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it. > broken connectors The microSD connector? In an educational context, that shouldn’t be end-user exposed. It’s essentially a maintenance port. Stick some tape over it. In the computer labs of the 90s, kids would break the CD-ROM drive trays, too. MDM software was developed that would, among other things, lock out the CD-tray eject mechanism unless/until a teacher enabled it (presumably for working through some whole-class “multimedia” product that never materialized, because who’d trust kids to insert the CDs?)
- wtallis 6y ago> If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it. SD cards and USB flash drives are manufactured with lower-grade flash memory than SATA and NVMe SSDs. The stuff that wears out in RPi usage is the stuff that was rejected for desktop usage. So having a large failure rate is not the only option, if you can expose a SATA or PCIe port. It's a little disappointing that they cannot even offer end users that upgrade path.
- Uberphallus 6y agoI've had all RPi versions except RPi4, running at least 1 of them 24/7 since the first one was released, and by the first year I had a cron that dd'd the card every night, and I found myself dding the backup image at least 2-3 times per year. RPi3+ has had no problem so far, and I'm not upgrading to RPi4 out of fear of it becoming an unstable mess again.
- jiofih 6y agoSchools are not running 24/7 servers from them.
- Uberphallus 6y agoSchools may have a lab with 30, used 2h per day, makes it more than double my failure rate. Add kids popping the cards in and out all the time and you have a recipe for disaster.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoSchools are, however, probably power-cycling the Pi daily, and power-cycling can be just as detrimental to an SD card.
- _trampeltier 6y agoI did run Boinc on over 20 different SBCs for 2 or 3 years. So they run 24/7 with 100% and I just had 2 broken SD cards from all those SBCs. I guess thats fine.
- qwertox 6y ago> Complaints like yours are relatively rare. I've stopped complaining because I already know how the issue manifests and how to solve it. A SD-card is not a proper replacement for a drive, it's a fine storage medium.
- wott 6y agoAs far as I am concerned, I consider SD cards the equivalent of a floppy disk. The equivalent of a hard drive would then be a CF card (unfortunately much less common than SD cards these days). Or of course any USB drive if we give up on the card format/connection style.
- numpad0 6y agoModern day CF replacement is CFexpress. PCIe 3.0 x1 NVMe, forward compatible with XQD.
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y agoYeah but RPi SoC is apparently lacking in PCIe lanes. I think they need a different SoC so they can finally have ethernet/storage/usb controller on the PCIe bus.
- lmns 6y agoHow do you know that complaints about the storage system are rare?
- sgt 6y agoI think that's because "most people" who buy a Raspberry PI use it once or twice then it lies in a drawer somewhere. In my experience, if you actively use it for something, you'll get into annoying problems like that, it's just a matter of time and how much you are hitting that SD card, or how many times you unplug it without shutting down the Pi properly.
- aembleton 6y agoI've had my Pi 3 running constantly for the last three years as a Plex server. The only thing that has gone wrong is the Western Digital hard disk drive that failed. The Pi itself and even the microSD card have been fine.
- tobias3 6y agoThere is a sticky thread in the forums and such threads are always just the tip of the iceberg: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245931 My guess: The VL805 USB 3.0 UAS is broken.
- stevehawk 6y agoI think you’re confusing your lack of knowledge of the commonality of this with the assumption that it is rare. I don’t know anyone who expects a Pi with SD to last more than a year. And the “solution” is always to buy the more expensive SD cards that last longer. And that’s not a solution. It’s time for Raspberry to give up the SD card for a real form factor. I can get a 120gb nvme that’ll likely never fail in my lifetime of Pi usage, or carry two mirrored SD cards for the inevitable failure that’ll happen when I can’t re-image a machine (like in flight - https://stratux.me https://stratux.me)
- ldiracdelta 6y agoThis spring, I deployed 20 PI's at work for a project and they are used every day, many many times a day. I've had 2 corrupt SD card failures so far. It's hard to know for certain what the cause is. We have spare SD cards to swap in for this application. For my application, having a spare SD image isn't a problem and I don't need five 9's of uptime, but the SD cards seem to be a point of fragility. Ultimately we're very happy with the system, but the SD cards are a point of failure that just need to be mitigated.
- kingosticks 6y agoIs your use-case not perfect for the network boot feature?
- ldiracdelta 6y agoMany are remote and rural. Internet and network is frequently iffy. Has to work completely offline for hours at a time as needed, including after a power cycle.
- zemo 6y agoyou're right, they want to not debug anything at all, they want to have a drawer full of microSD cards with the OS pre-installed. When a kid says "I have a problem" you say "ok here's a fresh install" and swap the SD card.