3 ms·

For CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM t

For CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM to cache the frequently-used bits. The difference will be measured in a couple of dozen seconds on an hour-long build. SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.

tremon 1y ago
How long does the average SD card last in a build machine? I thought these cards only have write endurance of a few thousand cycles?
- brucehoult 1y ago
  You wouldn't want to use an SD card for a full time build machine at Fedora or Canonical. It's fine for a normal user doing a few builds a day. Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. Because of wear-levelling it's not how many times the busiest file is rewritten, but how many GB are written in total. 512GB cards currently cost $32, $35, or $40 depending on whether you want 100, 150, or 200 MB/s read speeds. A GCC src tree is 2.5GB, the build tree is 11GB. It's going to take ~40 clean builds to put one write cycle on the whole card, so you'll probably get 100,000 clean builds off a card before you wear it out. That's around 30 builds per cent.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. It's fine if you're using tmpfs, but I would expect written files on anything else to make it to disk even if they also spend some time in the write buffer. Especially on a build box where memory pressure is higher.
    - brucehoult 1y ago
      I buy boards with enough RAM. I usually have 10GB+ "buff/cache" on my 16GB RAM LicheePi 3A (SpacemiT K1 SoC) and Milk-V Megrez (EIC7700X P550 cores) boards which are my current "has RVV" and "faster" RISC-V boards.

tremon 1y ago

How long does the average SD card last in a build machine? I thought these cards only have write endurance of a few thousand cycles?

brucehoult 1y ago
You wouldn't want to use an SD card for a full time build machine at Fedora or Canonical. It's fine for a normal user doing a few builds a day. Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. Because of wear-levelling it's not how many times the busiest file is rewritten, but how many GB are written in total. 512GB cards currently cost $32, $35, or $40 depending on whether you want 100, 150, or 200 MB/s read speeds. A GCC src tree is 2.5GB, the build tree is 11GB. It's going to take ~40 clean builds to put one write cycle on the whole card, so you'll probably get 100,000 clean builds off a card before you wear it out. That's around 30 builds per cent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. It's fine if you're using tmpfs, but I would expect written files on anything else to make it to disk even if they also spend some time in the write buffer. Especially on a build box where memory pressure is higher.
  - brucehoult 1y ago
    I buy boards with enough RAM. I usually have 10GB+ "buff/cache" on my 16GB RAM LicheePi 3A (SpacemiT K1 SoC) and Milk-V Megrez (EIC7700X P550 cores) boards which are my current "has RVV" and "faster" RISC-V boards.