Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 293 posts

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#121

Post by velox_io »

pulse7 wrote: post #87
seanhandley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SD cards have a limited number of writes so if you have the OS constantly writing to it then eventually it sets itself read-only. You can mitigate this somewhat with https://github.com/azlux/log2ram With some finagling you can get them to boot an OS from an external disk then your SD card can just hold a read-only boot loader.

PLUS: You can get MicroSD card file system corruption if not using industrial grade MicroSD cards - especially when losing the power...

I believe this is mainly down to the FAT16/ FAT32 filesystem on the SD cards. Those filesystems have never been particularly reliable, when those were the dominant hard drive formats, MANY users back then lost data (and backing up to floppy had its own set of issues).

This is why you have to unmount USB drives, if you pull the drive while data is still in cache would also create problems. The difference is when copying files to the drives, it's sequential, you may lose a file or two. When it's the OS using it as the main drive there are loads of write operations going on.

At least it's easier to add battery backup to a Pi then most other computers.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#122

Post by JorgeGT »

nixgeek wrote: post #60
gadgetoid wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a better image here- https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/benchmarking-the-raspberry-pi...

How was that accomplished? Extremely nice image!

Many IR cameras have actually two cameras, a normal optical one with high resolution (~10^3 x 10^3), and the IR one (microbolometer) which is low resolution (~10^2 x 10^2). They ensemble the two pictures later and produce these results.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#123

Post by kevstev »

kingosticks wrote: post #90
giobox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see some kind of reasonable data on the breakdown of how many Pis actually end up in education environments vs RetroPie/Kodi/PiHole/whatever else "service on an SD card image" turnkey solution type thing people use them for. At this point, my guess/gut feel is that education is an increasingly small part of the market for the Pi, yet appears to still be the main focus of the Pi Foundation. I've always fel…

There is some data at https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

That's a great deck, I love the presentation and aesthetic.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#124

Post by jjwhitaker »

jrockway wrote: post #101
adrianmonk wrote: post #22

> If you run computing hardware at its thermal capacity for long periods of time, this will cause more wear on the parts than if they are run well inside their limits. So I have a moderately increased likelihood of, at some indefinite point in the future, having to spend a whole $35 to replace the Raspberry Pi. I can prevent this by spending extra money (and time) up front. In some cases, it might be worth it. Maybe…

I think if you focus too much on "$35" you will be very disappointed with the rpi. You need a power supply, that's $10. You need an SD card, that's $10. You need a case, that's $10. You need a micro HDMI to HDMI cable or two, that's $10. You need a fan, that's $10. If you mentally decide "the Raspberry Pi is a $100 computer all-in" you will be much happier. You won't buy one to sit in a drawer (as many on HN have com…

I have one in a drawr, like many. At my a few relatives I have PiHole running and they love it just had to walk my grandma through occasionally turning the pi off and on (pull the power, reconnect).

But I have the current Raspbian distro in a VM for messing around with as I don't need the hardware up. Once I have a use for the pi in my drawer it's going to be useful

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#125

Post by milofeynman »

geerlingguy wrote: post #28
BaconJuice wrote: post #20

Just a bit off-topic but what are you guys doing that you need to do CPU throttling? I just got a Pi4 and wondering if I'm missing out on some cool projects I can do with it :)

The Pi 4 is the first generation that's actually not horrible at running Kubernetes, so I'm mostly having fun with that (ongoing saga at www.pidramble.com).

Are you planning on adding a fan to the cluster?

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#126

Post by blackflame7000 »

dbg31415 wrote: post #50
LeonM wrote: post #6

So does the pi 3 if you stick it in a case, even with a heatsink. I was using a pi 3 with a heatsink in the official case to play a h265 movie (which will be software decoded on a pi3). After about 10 minutes I noticed it started dropping frames and it displayed the thermometer symbol in the top-right of the display. When I removed the top lid from the case, the temperature dropped enough for the thermometer icon to…

Over the years I've used Raspberry Pis as little media players, but they kept burning out every 3-4 months; the card reader (their SSD) wouldn't work, or they'd just blink some other error message. I thought they were just cheaply made ($35 after all). Anyway, long story short, I got a fan and the last one has been working for over a year without issues.

Also if you are not using a good power supply the Pi will happily operate on less current except when it needs that current during power-intensive operations like watching a movie. This could be causing silent corruption as it happened in my case. If you ever see a thunderbolt symbol best check your power supply.

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#127

Post by henryfjordan »

jrockway wrote: post #101
adrianmonk wrote: post #22

> If you run computing hardware at its thermal capacity for long periods of time, this will cause more wear on the parts than if they are run well inside their limits. So I have a moderately increased likelihood of, at some indefinite point in the future, having to spend a whole $35 to replace the Raspberry Pi. I can prevent this by spending extra money (and time) up front. In some cases, it might be worth it. Maybe…

I think if you focus too much on "$35" you will be very disappointed with the rpi. You need a power supply, that's $10. You need an SD card, that's $10. You need a case, that's $10. You need a micro HDMI to HDMI cable or two, that's $10. You need a fan, that's $10. If you mentally decide "the Raspberry Pi is a $100 computer all-in" you will be much happier. You won't buy one to sit in a drawer (as many on HN have com…

but when the chip fails from heat stress, you only need to replace that. The case, cables, and power supply will all presumably be fine.

$100 upfront, $35 to replace

Re: The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan

#129

Post by kllrnohj »

gadgetoid wrote: post #46
seanhandley wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried a heatsink but it didn't really help unless I had a desk fan providing some air flow.

This pretty much lines up with my findings. I popped the pre-installed heat-spreader off and applied a heatsink with noctua thermal paste... basically no difference- step-by-step chaos here: https://twitter.com/Gadgetoid/status/1151442153584910337 Just adding a small fan (trying to avoid blowing our own trumpet too much here) absolutely demolishes the cooling performance of any reasonably-sized heatsink. Presumably t…

convection cooling needs a decent gap between the fins for it to really work. This is why something like Noctua's passive cooler ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/14486/noctua-shows-off-concep... ) looks totally different from their tower coolers with a fan.

Just slapping a normal CPU heatsink on the pi4 will probably work OK just do the thermal mass and exterior surface area of it, but you're probably not going to get much convection-cooling from it, either.

Post reply on HN