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    A New Chapter for MagicMirror: The Community Takes the Lead
    Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.

    dead SD-card every aprox. 6 months

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • M Offline
      MadScientist
      last edited by

      I use the cheapest SSD I could get for my Pi at that time. It’s running non-stop for 2 years without any issues. You can get 120GB SSD’s for less than 20€. A SATA-USB adapter costs around 2€ from China. Maybe that’s an option for you.
      SD cards are not designed to be permanently written to. They wear out too fast.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • zdenekZ Offline
        zdenek
        last edited by

        @MadScientist thx, sounds great, i’ll try that

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • M Offline
          marvin424 Project Sponsor
          last edited by

          Hi Zdeněk,
          SD cards have limited write cycles so it’s just a question of time when your pi will not start.

          To increase their life, all manufactures have implemented an internal algorithm which uses different physical sectors when writing data to the SD-Card, see wear leveling.

          You can help your hardware if you “oversize” the SD-Card, avoid ram discs and swap partitions.
          I am using a 16GB SD-Card even though just 4GB is used by the system. It’s running now for more than 4 years without any trouble.

          Brgds, Michael…

          zdenekZ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • zdenekZ Offline
            zdenek @marvin424
            last edited by

            @marvin424 that’s really weird. I’m also using 16 cards, in both my mirrors (one is for testing) a in both I’ve had to replace card in about 6 months max. Maybe I’m using to many modules, maybe there is al lot of writes on card… I’ll try SSD

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • A Offline
              almliden
              last edited by

              I know this is an old thread, but hope someone finds this helpful.

              1. Use a proper power source, one reason for SD-cards to wear out fast is that the RPi doesn’t receive enough power to actually perform the writes and therefore writes bad data which corrupts the card. Depending on which model it is it might need more power. Since I switched to better power supplies I haven’t had a dead SD-card for quite a while, so it seem to have an impact.

              2. Use RPi-images that writes to /tmpfs, or configure them to write temporary data to RAM to reduce wear on the SD-card.

              3. Since it hasn’t been mentioned before in this thread, avoid powering off the device by removing power since this could cancel an ongoing write which potentially could corrupt the card. If you need to power it off, do it properly.

              SergeS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
              • SergeS Offline
                Serge @almliden
                last edited by

                @almliden said in dead SD-card every aprox. 6 months:

                Use RPi-images that writes to /tmpfs, or configure them to write temporary data to RAM to reduce wear on the SD-card.

                How to do that?

                MoreLinuxM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • MoreLinuxM Offline
                  MoreLinux @Serge
                  last edited by MoreLinux

                  @Serge said in dead SD-card every aprox. 6 months:

                  @almliden said in dead SD-card every aprox. 6 months:

                  Use RPi-images that writes to /tmpfs, or configure them to write temporary data to RAM to reduce wear on the SD-card.

                  How to do that?

                  As root user, edit the file /etc/fstab and add the following lines:

                  tmpfs    /tmp    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=100m    0 0
                  tmpfs    /var/tmp    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=30m    0 0
                  tmpfs    /var/log    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,mode=0755,size=100m    0 0
                  tmpfs    /var/run    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,mode=0755,size=2m    0 0
                  tmpfs    /var/spool/mqueue    tmpfs    defaults,noatime,nosuid,mode=0700,gid=12,size=30m    0 0
                  
                  

                  Now most of the write intensive files write to the Raspberry PI’s ram.

                  Disable the swap file, as it can be write intensive too. First check if you have swap activated with the command:

                  free -h
                  

                  If your total swap is 0B, you are good, if not, execute the following commands:

                  dphys-swapfile swapoff
                  dphys-swapfile uninstall
                  systemctl disable dphys-swapfile
                  

                  Now the command activated with the command:

                  free -h
                  

                  should tell you that you are not using the swap file anymore.

                  P 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • S Do not disturb
                    sdetweil
                    last edited by

                    i switched to using a small ssd USB stick, boot from the sd card, run from the usb stick… all the i/o goes to the ssd

                    Sam

                    How to add modules

                    learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

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                    • BKeyportB Offline
                      BKeyport Module Developer
                      last edited by

                      can you explain how to do this, or provide a link to an explaination?

                      The "E" in "Javascript" stands for "Easy"

                      S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • S Do not disturb
                        sdetweil @BKeyport
                        last edited by sdetweil

                        https://www.tomshardware.com/news/boot-raspberry-pi-from-usb,39782.html

                        really easy, copy all the data from sd to ssd, then change one line in sd config, reboot… voila

                        on one machine I had trouble with regularly, I had a 500gb ssd drive I wasn’t using…
                        for my main dev machine, I just bought a 128gig usb stick ssd. came with a cable, took 20 minutes to copy the data…spent $35 from amazon

                        Sam

                        How to add modules

                        learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                        S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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