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The death and rebirth of my home server

sgt.hootr.club

71–80 of 116 posts

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#71
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).

"Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes." This is not specific to RPis. When an SD card is subjected to "unpredictable" writes it creates potential risk of corruption. The writes are triggered by software, not the RPi hardware There is no rule that says the RPi user must mount the root filesystem r/w on the card. It can be mounted r/w on mfs or tmpfs, for example, and the card can be r…

And when you say "due to RPi owner behaviour" what you're saying is "due to the default setup". It's a Raspberry Pi problem. The devices are notorious for this issue for good reason.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#72

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

I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#73
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?

We “lost” a signage device in a facility we were doing an IoT refresh on.

It was an old wyse terminal, and at some point a CF adapter with an SD card was added, and a construction project buried it inside of a block wall. lol. It’s still there.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to guess that it was not a normal COTS SD card, and instead designed for continuous writes.

The factors for SD card failures in raspberry pi seem to be mostly SD cards not meant for the purpose and having things like swap, atime or disk logs enabled which leads to unnecessary writes.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies.

It really is a high failure rate.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies. It really is a high failure rate.

Do pis have an official power supply?

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

I've had enough SD and micro-SD cards die on phones and cameras to doubt that is the only problem.

People probably see more of a problem on raspberry pis because they write more to the memory than other systems.

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#79
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).

Alternatively cheapest fix is an m10 optane and nvme enclosure. You maybe need to enable usb quirks in the kernel depending on on enclosure. Costs about 20 bucks all in

That’ll keep the rasp online for essentially forever cause optane isn’t going to wear out

Re: The death and rebirth of my home server

#80
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 suspect it isn’t the hardware but the bullheaded approach of running a desktop Linux environment from an SD card.

You suspect correctly. Embedded applications are less affected, and mounting the card r/o solves the problem completely.
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