6 ms·

I love the RPi and what it has done to introduce computing/programming/linux to more people. However I can't get past how unreliable booting from an SD card has

I love the RPi and what it has done to introduce computing/programming/linux to more people. However I can't get past how unreliable booting from an SD card has been for me. I know reliability depends heavily on the SD card used and on the quality of board socket but I am disappointed that Rev 2 of the board did not come with the option of on-board flash.

olympus 12y ago
One of the stated goals of the RPi foundation is to keep the price as low as possible. Adding a few GB of NAND flash adds ~$5 to your BOM for the part, plus you have to redesign and solder that extra component to the PCB. All told, it would probably increase the price of the board by ~$10, and cause suppliers to have to maintain additional models of boards in their inventory. If you want a board with storage built in, look at the BeagleBone Black or the CubieBoard (there are several others as well). The communities for these boards aren't quite as large as the RPi's community but should still be large enough that you can get help doing whatever you need.
jamesu 12y ago
I too have had problems with reliability, though more so when the device has already booted. e.g. numerous times I've had the device completely hang during file access. When problems such as this crop up it really puts a dampener on the experience.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  True, USB IO deadlocks and power usage causing drops/freeze made me stop using it. It was a surprise how many things can go wrong when you're out of the comfort of an industrial brand built PC board.
  - maguirre 12y ago
    That's where I see the issues crop up. "Uncontrolled shutdowns" seem to be a killer of SD cards for me even when using R/O only filesystems. Wouldn't this be enough of a factor to point the issue towards software and not hardware though?
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Honestly I don't know. The rpi is a weird SoC though, and many things are handled in the GPU by a blob, even if it's software it's outside our control.
- techrat 12y ago
  brand of flash matters. before the raspi came along and popularized arm computing, there was a very lively scene around arm hacking out of existing devices. sheevaplug started the trend and people found that things like the seagate dockstar (a nas based hard drive dock) could be easily modified to boot a linux distro from usb and run as a low power headless server. we kept a list of results from our experiences of what issues we had when trying to use new/different thumbdrives in the dockstar. various issues with some brands included being unable to cold boot (boot from a power off state) or warm boot (boot when rebooting the system from a power on state). the brands that gave us issues were fairly consistent in this regards. we had the best luck with sandisk based thumbdrives. i imagine the situation and cause is probably similar, if not identical, in this case.
  - narrowrail 12y ago
    >sheevaplug started the trend Not to be pedantic, but before the Sheevaplug, there was the Linksys NSLU2, which came out in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/FirmwareMatrix http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/FirmwareMatrix
    - techrat 12y ago
      Pedantry noted. It's probably better describing the SheevaPlug as the device that fostered the trend towards plug computing rather than the one that encouraged device hacking as my statement would imply. I mistakenly omitted the key detail that the Dockstar was a custom piece of hardware that was based on the SheevaPlug... Same SOC and features.
    - jbuzbee 12y ago
      Those were the days! I was the first to hack in to get root on that little box but others took it much further than me! http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html I still have a couple around, but rarely turn them on.
ZenoArrow 12y ago
Where are you obtaining your SD cards from?
- maguirre 12y ago
  I have tried different brands for what I'd consider reputable vendors. I do photography as a hobby which has educated me on quality (lack there of) of some SD cards
  - ZenoArrow 12y ago
    Brands are certainly important, as are the vendors. Basically anything from eBay is a no go, regardless of brand, but I'm sure you knew that already.
custardcream 12y ago
Been lurking for a bit. Was hoping to say hello with a constructive comment but I have to jump in here. I bought a Pi model B for my daughter. Nothing but terrible unreliability. Booting problems as you state, power problems with the USB ports, random hangs and crashes and problems getting half of the devices recommended to work. I kind of expected that for the money but the thing that really pissed me off was when I raised these issues constructively on their forum, I was met with nothing but vicious denial and had my post deleted and account closed within an hour. Possibly the worst bit was the insinuation that I was clearly an idiot and this was all my fault. I'm technically literate (I'm quite handy with anything from an oscilloscope to GDB) but I can't imagine this doing well in the hands of teachers I.e. one of the target markets. She now uses an old ThinkPad X61 and finds it a million times more useful and with all the extra bits required on the Pi to get it to work, considerably better value for money. Not impressed. When your policy is to silence critics the product should be distrusted. As for the initial design brief to produce a useful educational computer, I think it fails entirely based on the sheer amount of friction between opening the box and writing your first program. I was brought up on a diet of BBC Micros and Acorn machines and despite the brand association, the Pi is nowhere near the mark. Her school even bought 20 Pis that are wheeled out for open evenings and otherwise never used as well in favour of bog standard PCs running python.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  I assume you did get the constructive feedback that you need a proper 5V power source? Because it will boot with lower, but then randomly crash all the time.
  - custardcream 12y ago
    Yes. I did a V-I curve of the wall wart and it was fine. I inspected the ripple under load with my scope too. I also had it hooked to a TTI bench PSU at 5.000v and it still had problems (I have a large selection of proper test gear at my disposal). They didn't like those facts.
    - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
b1gtuna 12y ago
Have you made sure your power supply is reliable?
- maguirre 12y ago
  That's a good question. I haven't paid much attention to the power supply. I have a regulated (lab grade) power supply I am going to check if there are any changes when powered by it
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - justin66 12y ago
    There's a semi official wiki someplace that maintains a list of"confirmed" working power supplies and sd cards. One thing of value on that same wiki is instructions of how to test voltage on the pi board itself. On my phone now but I'm pretty sure the stuff I'm thinking of is on the elinux.org wiki.
tambourine_man 12y ago
Maybe I'm just lucky, but my model b has been nothing but rock solid. In fact, it syncs files across my machines through git and runs crash plan 24/7. Absolutely love the little thing
- atmosx 12y ago
  I have 3 RPi deployments and at least two of those at home, one as 'home server' and the other one for dev projects. Never had a single SD-card failure. But a friend of mine, had a couple of failures...
101914 12y ago
Just to give a different perspective, I think booting from SD card is my favorite aspect of the RPi (although I do not disagree with your comment). This is because I find it gives me easier flexibility in switching between kernels with embedded userlands. I run my OS from RAM with only tmpfs for secondary storage, and I make my SD cards read-only. I do not try to use an SD card like a HDD, but I am aware that many people probably do and I am probably in the minority. In sum, I find booting from the SD card is just easier when developing than constantly re-flashing on-board chips. I doubt that this was the intention behind having the RPi store the bootloader on an SD card, but I am thankfule for it. For ease of development for people like me, if nothing else, I sometimes wish more ARM evaluation boards would provide a similar boot from SD card option (where I choose the bootloader), in addition to on-board flash.
- iwwr 12y ago
  Would r-pi work better with 1gb or more of ram, or would that push the price into a prohibitive range? What about usb3 or sata/esata?
  - whiskers 12y ago
    The SOC doesn't support more than 512MB of RAM (or USB3). Raspberry Pi is built to a price point above all else - you could keep adding/upgrading features but you'd just end up way out of their target price.
pjc50 12y ago
On-board flash severely complicates the setup and recovery process: how do you get the OS in there> Also, strangely, it's more compact than almost all Flash packages of comparable capacity.
rlpb 12y ago
There's one big advantage of using an SD card only, and this turns into a really massive advantage when you consider the target market. There is no state persisted on the board apart from on the SD card. I have a set of SD cards, and can switch between them at will. My Pi completely switches personality, with no internal state to confuse things. Kids can play and risk breaking things as much as they want. The restore process is simple: take the SD card to a (normal) computer, rewrite the image, and you're set to go again. On-board flash completely ruins the guarantee that replacing the SD card is all that is necessary (unless there is a hardware fault).
pingec 12y ago
I am of a similar opinion. Here's my story. I wanted to use the r.pi for storing sensor data sent from an arduino over serial port. The arduino worked rock stable but there were so many problems with the r.pi. Let me describe some of them. First had a problem of r.pi freezing every few days. This was the first revision. The community said I must have had a bad SD card or a bad power supply or a bad USB hub. I was determined to make it work. I went ahead and bought 3 more power supplies and 2 USB hubs and 5 SD cards all of different but recommended models for use with r.pi. The freezes did not go away. At this point the community just started shrugging or saying I must be doing something wrong. This got me very frustrated. So one day I ordered a new r.pi (model A), plugged in place of the old one and freezes were gone, ha! However, there were still problems I could not work out. For example running lcd4linux with dpf-ax display on USB would make the r.pi freeze/crash (with kdb session spawned on r.pi serial port) after a few hours. Another problem was data corruption on power loss. For example I had a FAT formatted USB flash stick to which I was logging data. And one day after an electricity blackout I find 80% of the files on that stick corrupt. I don't know why that would happen, I would expect maybe the active files being affected but not the files that had not been read nor written to since months before. Here is an example of data corruption [1]. Can anyone explain how this can happen? Any ideas? I addressed the lcd4linux problem by buying a beaglebone black which has no such problems. I am still scared that one day my data will corrupt again so now I am logging straight to github. To summarize, I think r.pi was definitely not worth the time nor the money I spent on it. Although I really wanted to, I could not make it work in the end. [1] http://pingec.si/corruption.JPG http://pingec.si/corruption.JPG
- maguirre 12y ago
  Data corruption during power loss has also been one of my biggest headaches with it comes to single board computers. I don't think I can say this is an issue that afflicts RPis only. However if you attempt to log data into the same device that you boot from you are asking for trouble imho. Someone else in this thread mentioned running the OS from RAM. I didn't know this was an option but I need to do some reading on how to do this. In your case though, I think backing up to a remote device is about the only sensible way to attack the data corruption problem.

olympus 12y ago

One of the stated goals of the RPi foundation is to keep the price as low as possible. Adding a few GB of NAND flash adds ~$5 to your BOM for the part, plus you have to redesign and solder that extra component to the PCB. All told, it would probably increase the price of the board by ~$10, and cause suppliers to have to maintain additional models of boards in their inventory. If you want a board with storage built in, look at the BeagleBone Black or the CubieBoard (there are several others as well). The communities for these boards aren't quite as large as the RPi's community but should still be large enough that you can get help doing whatever you need.

jamesu 12y ago

I too have had problems with reliability, though more so when the device has already booted. e.g. numerous times I've had the device completely hang during file access. When problems such as this crop up it really puts a dampener on the experience.

agumonkey 12y ago
True, USB IO deadlocks and power usage causing drops/freeze made me stop using it. It was a surprise how many things can go wrong when you're out of the comfort of an industrial brand built PC board.
- maguirre 12y ago
  That's where I see the issues crop up. "Uncontrolled shutdowns" seem to be a killer of SD cards for me even when using R/O only filesystems. Wouldn't this be enough of a factor to point the issue towards software and not hardware though?
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Honestly I don't know. The rpi is a weird SoC though, and many things are handled in the GPU by a blob, even if it's software it's outside our control.
techrat 12y ago
brand of flash matters. before the raspi came along and popularized arm computing, there was a very lively scene around arm hacking out of existing devices. sheevaplug started the trend and people found that things like the seagate dockstar (a nas based hard drive dock) could be easily modified to boot a linux distro from usb and run as a low power headless server. we kept a list of results from our experiences of what issues we had when trying to use new/different thumbdrives in the dockstar. various issues with some brands included being unable to cold boot (boot from a power off state) or warm boot (boot when rebooting the system from a power on state). the brands that gave us issues were fairly consistent in this regards. we had the best luck with sandisk based thumbdrives. i imagine the situation and cause is probably similar, if not identical, in this case.
- narrowrail 12y ago
  >sheevaplug started the trend Not to be pedantic, but before the Sheevaplug, there was the Linksys NSLU2, which came out in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/FirmwareMatrix http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/FirmwareMatrix
  - techrat 12y ago
    Pedantry noted. It's probably better describing the SheevaPlug as the device that fostered the trend towards plug computing rather than the one that encouraged device hacking as my statement would imply. I mistakenly omitted the key detail that the Dockstar was a custom piece of hardware that was based on the SheevaPlug... Same SOC and features.
  - jbuzbee 12y ago
    Those were the days! I was the first to hack in to get root on that little box but others took it much further than me! http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html I still have a couple around, but rarely turn them on.

ZenoArrow 12y ago

Where are you obtaining your SD cards from?

maguirre 12y ago
I have tried different brands for what I'd consider reputable vendors. I do photography as a hobby which has educated me on quality (lack there of) of some SD cards
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  Brands are certainly important, as are the vendors. Basically anything from eBay is a no go, regardless of brand, but I'm sure you knew that already.

custardcream 12y ago

Been lurking for a bit. Was hoping to say hello with a constructive comment but I have to jump in here. I bought a Pi model B for my daughter. Nothing but terrible unreliability. Booting problems as you state, power problems with the USB ports, random hangs and crashes and problems getting half of the devices recommended to work. I kind of expected that for the money but the thing that really pissed me off was when I raised these issues constructively on their forum, I was met with nothing but vicious denial and had my post deleted and account closed within an hour. Possibly the worst bit was the insinuation that I was clearly an idiot and this was all my fault. I'm technically literate (I'm quite handy with anything from an oscilloscope to GDB) but I can't imagine this doing well in the hands of teachers I.e. one of the target markets. She now uses an old ThinkPad X61 and finds it a million times more useful and with all the extra bits required on the Pi to get it to work, considerably better value for money. Not impressed. When your policy is to silence critics the product should be distrusted. As for the initial design brief to produce a useful educational computer, I think it fails entirely based on the sheer amount of friction between opening the box and writing your first program. I was brought up on a diet of BBC Micros and Acorn machines and despite the brand association, the Pi is nowhere near the mark. Her school even bought 20 Pis that are wheeled out for open evenings and otherwise never used as well in favour of bog standard PCs running python.

vanderZwan 12y ago
I assume you did get the constructive feedback that you need a proper 5V power source? Because it will boot with lower, but then randomly crash all the time.
- custardcream 12y ago
  Yes. I did a V-I curve of the wall wart and it was fine. I inspected the ripple under load with my scope too. I also had it hooked to a TTI bench PSU at 5.000v and it still had problems (I have a large selection of proper test gear at my disposal). They didn't like those facts.
  - AlyssaRowan 12y ago

b1gtuna 12y ago

Have you made sure your power supply is reliable?

maguirre 12y ago
That's a good question. I haven't paid much attention to the power supply. I have a regulated (lab grade) power supply I am going to check if there are any changes when powered by it
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- justin66 12y ago
  There's a semi official wiki someplace that maintains a list of"confirmed" working power supplies and sd cards. One thing of value on that same wiki is instructions of how to test voltage on the pi board itself. On my phone now but I'm pretty sure the stuff I'm thinking of is on the elinux.org wiki.

tambourine_man 12y ago

Maybe I'm just lucky, but my model b has been nothing but rock solid. In fact, it syncs files across my machines through git and runs crash plan 24/7. Absolutely love the little thing

atmosx 12y ago
I have 3 RPi deployments and at least two of those at home, one as 'home server' and the other one for dev projects. Never had a single SD-card failure. But a friend of mine, had a couple of failures...

101914 12y ago

Just to give a different perspective, I think booting from SD card is my favorite aspect of the RPi (although I do not disagree with your comment). This is because I find it gives me easier flexibility in switching between kernels with embedded userlands. I run my OS from RAM with only tmpfs for secondary storage, and I make my SD cards read-only. I do not try to use an SD card like a HDD, but I am aware that many people probably do and I am probably in the minority. In sum, I find booting from the SD card is just easier when developing than constantly re-flashing on-board chips. I doubt that this was the intention behind having the RPi store the bootloader on an SD card, but I am thankfule for it. For ease of development for people like me, if nothing else, I sometimes wish more ARM evaluation boards would provide a similar boot from SD card option (where I choose the bootloader), in addition to on-board flash.

iwwr 12y ago
Would r-pi work better with 1gb or more of ram, or would that push the price into a prohibitive range? What about usb3 or sata/esata?
- whiskers 12y ago
  The SOC doesn't support more than 512MB of RAM (or USB3). Raspberry Pi is built to a price point above all else - you could keep adding/upgrading features but you'd just end up way out of their target price.

pjc50 12y ago

On-board flash severely complicates the setup and recovery process: how do you get the OS in there> Also, strangely, it's more compact than almost all Flash packages of comparable capacity.

rlpb 12y ago

There's one big advantage of using an SD card only, and this turns into a really massive advantage when you consider the target market. There is no state persisted on the board apart from on the SD card. I have a set of SD cards, and can switch between them at will. My Pi completely switches personality, with no internal state to confuse things. Kids can play and risk breaking things as much as they want. The restore process is simple: take the SD card to a (normal) computer, rewrite the image, and you're set to go again. On-board flash completely ruins the guarantee that replacing the SD card is all that is necessary (unless there is a hardware fault).

pingec 12y ago

I am of a similar opinion. Here's my story. I wanted to use the r.pi for storing sensor data sent from an arduino over serial port. The arduino worked rock stable but there were so many problems with the r.pi. Let me describe some of them. First had a problem of r.pi freezing every few days. This was the first revision. The community said I must have had a bad SD card or a bad power supply or a bad USB hub. I was determined to make it work. I went ahead and bought 3 more power supplies and 2 USB hubs and 5 SD cards all of different but recommended models for use with r.pi. The freezes did not go away. At this point the community just started shrugging or saying I must be doing something wrong. This got me very frustrated. So one day I ordered a new r.pi (model A), plugged in place of the old one and freezes were gone, ha! However, there were still problems I could not work out. For example running lcd4linux with dpf-ax display on USB would make the r.pi freeze/crash (with kdb session spawned on r.pi serial port) after a few hours. Another problem was data corruption on power loss. For example I had a FAT formatted USB flash stick to which I was logging data. And one day after an electricity blackout I find 80% of the files on that stick corrupt. I don't know why that would happen, I would expect maybe the active files being affected but not the files that had not been read nor written to since months before. Here is an example of data corruption [1]. Can anyone explain how this can happen? Any ideas? I addressed the lcd4linux problem by buying a beaglebone black which has no such problems. I am still scared that one day my data will corrupt again so now I am logging straight to github. To summarize, I think r.pi was definitely not worth the time nor the money I spent on it. Although I really wanted to, I could not make it work in the end. [1] http://pingec.si/corruption.JPG http://pingec.si/corruption.JPG

maguirre 12y ago
Data corruption during power loss has also been one of my biggest headaches with it comes to single board computers. I don't think I can say this is an issue that afflicts RPis only. However if you attempt to log data into the same device that you boot from you are asking for trouble imho. Someone else in this thread mentioned running the OS from RAM. I didn't know this was an option but I need to do some reading on how to do this. In your case though, I think backing up to a remote device is about the only sensible way to attack the data corruption problem.