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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

#61

Post by ErroneousBosh »

Palomides wrote: post #44
whartung wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's actually weird that Raspberry Pis seem so bad at using SD cards.

I've just scrapped a large PBX which had a whopping 8MB SD card in it. Its 486 processor booted Linux off the SD card, it wrote CDRs to the SD card, it served said CDRs up over a web interface off it, it saved its logs to the card, and all the other day-to-day chatter of a running system.

It was installed pretty much 20 years ago. The date sticker on the SD card shows that it was replaced 18 years ago, presumably as part of an upgrade.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#62

Post by b112 »

rustyhancock wrote: post #24
inigyou wrote: post #2

Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).

Just have the raspberry pi boot from a USB/SSD. Rpi5 has a pcie slot if you want a cleaner setup.

Really would just prefer a working, non-buggy, Pi2 maybe without all the crazy extra power + compute + RAM. Or at least have the option, because $20 is more my style for a lot of these tasks, not $150CDN.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#63

Post by bombcar »

organsnyder wrote: post #54
bombcar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is for hard drives - SMART - the problem is, unless you're an enterprise (and let's all stop and laugh because we KNOW that most "enterprises" run at least some hardware until the only person who even knows it exists is long in the grave) you're not going to do preventative replacement. And especially for home use, where nien 9s is more realistic than nine 9s, you're better off having a solid backup strategy an…

I run a k8s cluster in my homelab, with Longhorn providing storage. Except for some extra-large volumes for bulk storage (just movies in Jellyfin right now), everything is replicated three ways. I've had nodes fail to boot up after a power outage (turned out to be a dead CMOS battery) and procrastinated bringing them back up because everything just kept working.

That’s the biggest danger with hot fail over at homelab setting. It keeps working so there’s no reason to fix it.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#64

Post by baq »

inigyou wrote: post #2

Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).

I’ve got an rpi4 booting from an usb ssd and bought a n100 minipc anyway… last February for $150. Should have bought a 40ft container of these

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#65

Post by andruby »

inigyou wrote: post #2

Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).

I'm super happy with an Odroid H3 as a NAS: low power usage, silent, x86, nvme + 2 sata ports. Runs home assistant, smb shares and a few more things

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#66

Post by steinuil »

mtzet wrote: post #60
fuzzy2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main point is to use zswap over swap plus zram. The sd card usecase definitely doesnt want swap to disk, compressed or otherwise, so zram or no swap are the options.

Exactly. The previous install of the system had no swap at all so enabling zram is an improvement.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#67

Post by mvanbaak »

mtzet wrote: post #60
fuzzy2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main point is to use zswap over swap plus zram. The sd card usecase definitely doesnt want swap to disk, compressed or otherwise, so zram or no swap are the options.

Moving swap off of sdcard is indeed a good plan. But since swapping is done when ram is depleted, using a ramdisk for it (which uses ram) is ... exactly what you dont want. Since OP states they have disks attached to the machine as well, the better thing is use a partition there for swap.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#68

Post by jjav »

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…

My primary home zfs server is from 2010, running 24x7 since then. It has a 4-way mirror zfs pool for data. Over the years I have replaced two of the four drives, so two are still original from 2010. Everything else on the machine is from 2010.

You can get unlucky and have components fail quickly, but usually if they last, they'll last for a long time.

But trying to run a server from an SD card like in the article, seems silly. False economy, just get a good SSD.

For drive health monitoring there is SMART, but IME while it does monitor drive usage and lifetime, it rarely predicts catastrophic failure since that happens suddenly. Both drives that failed in this system went from healthy (according to SMART) to unresponsive overnight.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#70

Post by PunchyHamster »

tuatoru wrote: post #43
inigyou wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

relatime is a default for a while now, like decade+, you don't need to set up mount option just to get relatime

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