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0 pointsbityard5y ago0 comments

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is:

1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance.

2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

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13 comments · 5 top-level

GordonS5y ago· 7 in thread

As this point, it's practically a meme.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these devices in over 5 years. Not one - and they boot from SD cards!

The stuff running on the RPis isn't very write heavy, and the cases are only lightly ruggedised (I forget the brand, but they are consumer gear, nothing fancy), and I forget what brand the SD cards are - but this is why I roll my eyes every time this is mentioned on HN (which is every time RPi is mentioned on HN). I really wonder what fraction of people repeating this reliability claim even have an RPi.

thunfischbrot5y ago

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take great care.

Younger generations have not had these issues for me. While I assigned that to my experience, usually reducing logging to sd card, booting off of USB and fewer unexpected power losses, it may simply not be an issue any more.

sdlion5y ago

> Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss

Though in my experience as a technician installing 2.5" consumer grade / entry level Kingston/ADATA SSD to several clients, this is what generally will kill NAND flash devices, it's not an exclusive phenomenon to uSD cards.

I have a few running RPi's on premises for years. Ranging from v1 to now v4, certainly the only uSD 3 failures I have had has been with the early models and reliability went up with...... just a No-break power source. Just that.

It seems a lot of people think a sudden power loss it's what's only dangerous for electronics and NAND flash devices but for devices that are highly sensitive to browning down power rails (specially those first v1 raspis) any unstable power source is a rave party from which is hard to get out unscathed.

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outworlder5y ago

Not sure how good wear leveling is across brands of SD cards, but given the much larger SD cards available today, it may be a factor.

callesgg5y ago

Yeah i have the same experience with about 100 pi’s. But I still added a mitigation making the log directory a overlayfs with tempfs underneath.

I think that reduced the number of writes to the sd card allot.

bekindandopen5y ago

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"?

I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

lifeisstillgood5y ago

Many have tried but sadly there is a limited supply of skilled Jawa Programmers.

I tried to hire some to start such a project but I must have been looking in Alderaan places ...

GordonS5y ago

Heh, it's nothing so fancy. There are a bunch of different types of land rig: some small ones come apart and get stuffed in the back of vans/lorries, others sit on a trailer, and some are self-propelled[0] [1].

Of course, it's not just 1 piece of equipment that moves around it's people, tech etc - some land rigs are almost semi-nomadic, with the whole camp moving around.

[0] https://www.nov.com/products/mobile-rigs

[1] https://www.nov.com/-/media/nov/files/products/rig/rig-equip...

ohazi5y ago· 1 in thread

It's much easier to buy industrial [1] and high endurance [2] microSD cards now. SanDisk/WD started selling them to the public due to the popularity of dashcams that record continuously. No more buying cards on digikey from a manufacturer you'd never heard of for 10x the price.

I haven't seen reports of these particular cards being counterfeited yet, but still... you probably shouldn't buy them from Amazon...

[1] https://www.westerndigital.com/products/commercial-removable...

[2] https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/memory-cards/sandis...

gnramires5y ago

WD Purple does seem to have proper wear-leveling as well[1], which are easy to find in retailers anywhere for a reasonable price.

I believe over-provisioning space to delay wear if you write much can also help (in conjunction with wear leveling).

[1] See this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_...

michrassena5y ago

I definitely had this issue with the first generation Raspberry Pi. It wasn't just a corrupted filesystem. The SD card was completely ruined. When I started over, I followed instructions to make the file system readonly, turn off the tmpfs, turn off atime, etc. And never had another issue. Eventually I replaced the Pi with a newer one and haven't had any problems even though the file system is read/write. I think this issue may have affected the earlier models more, or maybe SD cards are better now.

tyingq5y ago

I brought it up because it was being sold as an appliance type device with invoice data on it, to be sold to probably non-technical customers. Not just as a random gripe. I did reply, after finding that specific product page, with an update that she is shipping it with a real drive.

skrtskrt5y ago

Can a RPi4 bought before the USB boot was added have it enabled?

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