Raspberry Pi SD Card wear out?

[dbemowsk]

When I ran my Raspberry PI years ago, I blew through a couple cheap SD cards. I had read about the Pi and the problems that people had with SD cards wearing out, so I decided to do the external hard drive solution. I had a USB to multi-format HDD reader (IDE, and SATA) and just pulled an old hard drive that I had laying around to use for the OS. Basically all you put on the SD is the boot partition that you then point to the external HDD for the rest of the OS. When my RasPi died and I migrated to an Orange PI PC, I pretty much did the same thing. Now I run my Vera Plus as my main HA controller and only have the Orange running my OWFS stuff that my Vera accesses.

[napo7]

@gohan If you are using dietPi, you just have to run the command "dietpi-drive-manager" (sorry not sure of exact spelling, I'm not near a dietpi !)
Then, you'll have a menu that will allow you to choose per-partition read only or read-write.

@dbemowsk That's a good point to avoir SD wear-out, but it didn't avoided me the corrupted ext4 partition on a power-fail.
That's why I did choose to set the root partition as RO, so I'm sure the system will not hang at startup because of "partition not clean, cannot mount it" ;)

[gohan]

I'll give it a try. How about the users' folders? Aren't they in the root partition?

[napo7]

@gohan No they should'nt, as soon as they need to be modified.

There is probably better filesystems which are powerfail-resistant, but I'm not an expert and can't name any of them !
The main subject is still applicable : beware of wear ! Userdata which moves frequently such as databases should not be on a sd-card. Why not on an external HDD (or SSD...)

[dbemowsk]

@napo7 corrupted ext4 on what? the SD card or the HDD? If it is just a corrupted sd card, all you need to do is create another one and point it to the HDD for boot and you should not loose anything. If it is an ext4 on the HDD that is corrupted from a power failure, there are ways of repairing it e.g. fsck.

[napo7]

Yes, I know that fsck repair the partition, but it's not really convenient to run a fsck at 4' AM because the server has crashed and doesn't want to startup because of corrupted FS ;)

[dbemowsk]

@napo7 That is true with any server. So if you want to prevent those things from happening when there is a power failure, you put a UPS on it. Otherwise you live with the FSCK option. Simple math.

[gohan]

@napo7 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10W-3-7V-4-2V-Charger-5V-6V-9V-12V-Discharger-Board-DC-DC-Converter-Boost/32816412117.html

[mfalkvidd]

Has anyone looked at using f2fs? Support is supposedly available for Raspberry pi now. It's on my list of things to investigate, but I haven't gotten aroud to it yet.

Guide: http://whitehorseplanet.org/gate/topics/documentation/public/howto_ext4_to_f2fs_root_partition_raspi.html

[vikasjee]

Try using Berryboot on SD card with a USB /pen drive. It will help in SD card wear out and power out cases. I am running multiple Raspis with multi boot option on Berryboot (added advantage ) for the last 2+years. Not much of a problem till date. Lots of power outages here... No UPS support!

[gohan]

Do you mean to have all the operating system on the USB drive?

[vikasjee]

@gohan Yes!

[gohan]

BTW, I noticed dietpi already has a 460MB tempfs mounted as /tmp so I changed domoticz script to use that for log and it is working

[Nca78]

After a failure with a cheap sd card, I've been running Domoticz for around 3 years on a Sandisk SD card with strictly no change to file system/partitions/..., I've probably had around 100 power cuts during that time (it's Vietnam...) and everything is still fine.
I think it's related to the fact that's it's a Pi 1 Model B, so it's still using SD card and not micro SD, I'll soon move to a Pi3 so it might not end up with the same experience :)

[gohan]

There are adapters from microsd to standard SD if you feel a little nostalgic 😁

[MagnusF]

Perhaps not the best solution but easy for a beginner.
It's possible to use "Win32 Disk Imager" to make an image of the a RPi SD card and save on e.g. Windows PC. Explained here: https://computers.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-clone-your-raspberry-pi-sd-cards-with-windows--mac-59294
If you make an image, e.g. after changes in openHAB or at selected times, can't this be used to restore the system?
I'm aware of that data colected since the last made image will be lost and the system is down during the process.

[gohan]

Actually yes, if you make an image from a SD card and you flash it back you get a system working at that previous state. I actually use dietpi that has a built in backup/restore feature that I already used few times and it even worked to restore to another RPI also running the same dietpi