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The death and rebirth of my home server

sgt.hootr.club

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Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#41

Post by close04 »

inigyou wrote: post #5
danparsonson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash memory generally doesn't have great lifespan for repeated writes; using it as a root device is going to kill it pretty quickly. I had a similar problem once running a NAS off a USB stick; within a year of so the stick would no longer accept new data and I swapped it out for an SSD instead.

Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

I’ve had the same issues in the Pi1-3 era, can’t say for sure if it was the Pi, the SD card, or the software running on top (HA was a big culprit). The last issues were probably before 2018-2018. Since then I don’t remember having any failure and I have a bunch of Pi3s and 4s running with flawlessly for about that long, including HA.

Since then I’ve been careful to buy high quality cards, oversized them a bit, optimize the OS and apps with regards to writes (like no unnecessary logging), and paid attention to airflow. The software probably also evolved to fix the issues.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#42

Post by steinuil »

taude wrote: post #26

If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool. I bought all the stuff (new case, networking card and a Jonsbro N4 to repurpose some intel i7-9700 era processor and motherboard, but didn't get it setup yet, as I was starting to rethink the power consumption.... Also looking to use this rebuild as an opportunity to learn Nix. Let me know if you all have some good article refere…

> If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool.

Yes! It runs completely fine on a Pi, except for the machine learning service. The good news is that you can run that service on a separate computer with a GPU and point Immich to it. Immich will use it when it's available and I think you can configure it to run all the queued ML jobs at a certain time when you expect the computer running the ML service to be on.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#43

Post by tuatoru »

inigyou wrote: post #5
danparsonson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash memory generally doesn't have great lifespan for repeated writes; using it as a root device is going to kill it pretty quickly. I had a similar problem once running a NAS off a USB stick; within a year of so the stick would no longer accept new data and I swapped it out for an SSD instead.

Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

Let alone things like putting /var/tmp and/or /var/log in RAM, or long commit intervals.

No idea what the current situation is; Pis are too dear for the likes of me now.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#44

Post by Palomides »

whartung wrote: post #29
inigyou wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

Are there other computers that run off of SD cards long term successfully that are not Raspberry Pi’s?

I work on embedded linux machines that go a decade plus in active use with micro sd cards, it's not a problem at all

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#45

Post by unanimous »

ranger207 wrote: post #34

If you're using a USB adapter on a Pi 4 you can use raspi-config to enable booting from an external drive and not worry about SD cards at all

For anyone trying this with a Pi older than the Pi 4, you might still need an SD card with one file on it: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#49

Post by ranger207 »

larrydag wrote: post #7

I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…

About the only thing that regularly wears out is spinning drives, and those have SMART data to give you an idea of when they'll die, but generally yif you're actually committing to high uptime you'll have redundant hardware so any one server failing doesn't take the service down, giving a bit of a grace period on hardware failures

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#50

Post by fuzzy2 »

schmeichel wrote: post #47
mvanbaak wrote: post #46

> I chose to enable zram for swap swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?

Zram creates a compressed RAM disk. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram

It's also not the optimal choice in most situations: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
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