SD endurance and external hard drive?

dgktkr · December 3, 2017 at 1:30 AM

Can someone point me to instructions on how to get LibreELEC to use a HDD for its normal system activities after booting and not write on the SD card once things are configured properly?

I've found instructions that suggest editing /flash/cmdline.txt to point to the drive, but after doing that I notice the HDD is mounted under /storage. As near as I can tell, the system still reads (and writes) on the SD card in its normal operation (instead of the HDD), subjecting the SD card to wear out. One example is to write logs, for instance. Is that correct?

dgktkr

**chewitt** · December 3, 2017 at 2:20 PM Official Post

Is this on a Raspberry Pi .. if yes, what model?

**kszaq** · December 3, 2017 at 3:04 PM

Also note that system partition is read-only and nothing is being written to it = no wear. You only write to it when system updates.

storage partition is where all user data resides.

dgktkr · December 3, 2017 at 3:25 PM

Yes,

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

By logging in with ssh and executing mount, I can see that /flash is mounted read only, but there is a bunch of other stuff that is mounted read write. I don't know enough to tell whether the other stuff that is not on the hard drive is RAM resident or not.

dgktkr

**chewitt** · December 3, 2017 at 8:51 PM Official Post

RPi3 can boot directly from a USB drive if you're unduly paranoid about SD card wear. Google the USB boot instructions on the Pi Foundation website.

dgktkr · December 3, 2017 at 9:59 PM

chewitt and kszaq--

Thanks for the input. I've read the instructions for USB HDD boot on the Pi foundation website, but they state it involves an irreversible change and caution is advised as the capability is considered to be experimental (even though the posts appear to be over a year old!). So -- I'm reluctant to implement that solution.

Further investigation indicates that the stock LibreELEC for the Pi doesn't write to the SD card for frequent system activity or storage of user files if an external HDD has been installed and configured. My installation of LibreELEC has been in use for three or four days and executing "find /path/to/SD/ext4/partition -type f -newer /path/to/a/file/two/days/old" doesn't turn up anything.

Executing "find /storage -type f -newer /path/to/a/file/two/days/old" returns paths to logs and lots of other stuff.

Given that, I'm inclined to accept your assurances that it's not something to worry about.

dgktkr