Stable SD Card for Pi

Hardware Server
#1

Hi Guys,

i am running OH on an Pi 3.

It works perfekt, but i am afraid of an SD Card crash.
So i make a Backup to another SD Card every month.

Now i figured how other Commercial products (e.g Homeatic CCU) handle the sd Card weakness.

They are using a Special SD-Card like Sun Disk Industrial XI.

This SD-Cards has 192 TBW which means how many Terrabyte could be written.
So it seems to me, that ist sould be much more stable, than an conventional SD Card.

Did anyone have Experience with sun disk industrial SD Cards?

Best regards
vaillan

#2

Have you considered a USB SSD?

I pulled a 128Gb mSata drive from a dead laptop and put it into an USB adapter from Amazon. You can boot directly to it without needing an SD card.

In my case I even cloned my existing SD card to the SSD, no clean installation and all worked fine. I kept the partition the same size which gives the system a large overhead for block reallocations (I think that helps with level wearing on the drive).

#3

The wear out problem on SD cards is not your only problem. The other problem is loss of power and I don’t see how solely switching to one of these expensive cards addresses the power loss problem.

When you kill the power on a Linux machine there is a high probability of corrupting your file system. Honestly, this is probably the primary cause of failed SD cards. But there is no way for us to tell that so we have to assume that the SD card wore out in our recommendations.

So I strongly recommend also looking to some sort of UPS and always making sure to properly shutdown your machine.

Based on some of the prices I’m seeing, a small SSD would probably be a cheaper option.

1 Like
#4

Yes, switching to an SSD (USB adapters are cheap) and having a UPS is the correct solution. SD works great for a more-or-less readonly scenario…booting and running everything in RAM, for example. Not a great fit for the openhab usecase.

#5

Hi @rsemmens,

What steps did you follow to clone both partitions and get the RPi to boot from the SSD?

I’m able to get it to boot from the SD and use the SDD for storage, but for some reason it won’t boot from the SSD.

I’ve made the one time config change to enable USB boot, to no avail.

CHeers
James

#6

I followed this (I used a clean SD card). Followed by https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to read the openhab SD card to a file, then write it to the SSD once in the USB adapter.

I’m not 100% but it might only work on the pi 3+?

#7

There’s a couple of SDXC cards available to be tagged ‘industrial’, I found a 16GB Kingston one for 12€.
SanDisk has a white paper on these quoting use in automotive solutions.
I think it’s a reasonable step up in terms of reliability and cheaper than a SSD.
It’s not a perfect solution, though. You will still need to complement it with a UPS and backup solution if you want to be on the safe side.
Check out this post.