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_gfrc | 5 years ago

I've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn.

I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down.

Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62536

I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.

discuss

lloeki|5 years ago

Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues (bad power source or usb device that eats power). Ever since I took proper measures to ensure stable enough power I've had no issue (Pi 3B here)

avian|5 years ago

> Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues

Does anyone have any info on this that's more substantial than hearsay? Experiments, measurements or at least a more technical explanation than "bad power source"?

I'm persistently hearing this story that power supply quality affects SD card life. As an electrical engineer, and given what I know about R. Pi design, I fail to see how an SD card could get physically damaged by any reasonable power supply that would otherwise run the rest of the R.Pi.

I suspect people are confusing filesystem corruption due to brownouts/OS not shutting down cleanly with physical damage to the flash (i.e. unreadable sectors on SD card)

robotmay|5 years ago

I can second this. My previous company runs a few hundred Pi units across loads of separate locations; the locations where we had constant corruption issues were also the ones experiencing dodgy site power-supply issues. We did try various alternatives to cheap SD cards but ultimately running them off PoE from a switch attached to a UPS was a pretty good solution to the issue.

majewsky|5 years ago

Can you elaborate on these measures? Sounds interesting.