Is my micro SD card good enough, ?

1st Official Post

    Hi, just read that micro SD card must be good enough, to hold in time.. that got me a little bit concerned if my micro SD card will hold up.

    Someone said the card will only hold like 6 month before is worn out..

    Im running LE in a Rpi3, works great...

    I now have the Sandisk micro SD ULTRA 16GB card: https://www.amazon.co.uk/sandisk-microsdhc-memory-adapter-performance/dp/b073k14cvb


    I only use LE in the Rpi3 for watching 1080p videos, no logging, no internet, and as clean as possible in settings.

    I use the Rpi3 for like 2 hours 2-3 times a week,

    Is that card OK, will it hold over time?

    • Official Post

    It's a good one. Ca. 40 MB/s is the maximum reading speed inside of a RPi3, so the card is fast enough. Error correction is usually done by the file system, and maybe reduce the storage capacity over the years. Some cards have an additional internal error correction system.

    Extreme heat is the enemy of any card. With a good cooling strategy you can increase the card's lifetime. Kingston has some military grade cards, made for extreme temperature.

    I have tried a couple of different brands of SD cards. The only one that I would that is reliable is the Samsung EVO SD card. I have to PI 3's and I am using a 128 G and a 64 G SD cards and have not had a problem. With the other SD cards I was getting corruption errors and boot errors.

    If i make one extra Partition on my: SSD or my mechanical harddrive to lets say 100gb...

    Would installing LE Kodi there last longer then on my USB 32GB stick?

    • Official Post

    You maybe had some bad experiences, but I would stay with a MicroSD when it's just about storing the OS itself. Store all important personal data on an external SSD, and your system will be very save (SSD's are nearly unbreakable). Most MicroSD cards are killed by too much write processes. If they are just read (as the OS do), they will last very long.

    Quote from Da Flex

    You maybe had some bad experiences, but I would stay with a MicroSD when it's just about storing the OS itself. Store all important personal data on an external SSD, and your system will be very save (SSD's are nearly unbreakable). Most MicroSD cards are killed by too much write processes. If they are just read (as the OS do), they will last very long.

    I know this may be a bit off topic, but a few questions.

    is there a reason one cant do the LE upgrade on a USB stick rather than sd?

    Regards USB stick, how do they stand up to having an os installed.? I have need to install linux to a new drive yearly (read tax dates) and would like to just swap out old for new, each new fin. year, so keeping that year intact.

    • Official Post
    Quote from antcj

    I know this may be a bit off topic, but a few questions.

    is there a reason one cant do the LE upgrade on a USB stick rather than sd?

    Regards USB stick, how do they stand up to having an os installed.? I have need to install linux to a new drive yearly (read tax dates) and would like to just swap out old for new, each new fin. year, so keeping that year intact.

    To my limited knowledge, USB sticks and SD cards have no big difference in lifetime. They both last long, if they are just read.

    If you run Linux on a USB / SD medium, the interesting point is what data Linux writes back to that medium. A Linux system can be configured to write temporary data to the RAM instead of USB / SD. That's good for the lifetime of the medium. I think the Linux of LE does as much as it can to avoid writing data back to the storage medium. That's why I would keep a MicroSD for that special Linux.

    Other Linux systems write a lot of temporary data to the permanent storage medium. No problem for SSD, but bad for USB sticks or SD cards.

    Quote from Da Flex

    To my limited knowledge, USB sticks and SD cards have no big difference in lifetime. They both last long, if they are just read.

    If you run Linux on a USB / SD medium, the interesting point is what data Linux writes back to that medium. A Linux system can be configured to write temporary data to the RAM instead of USB / SD. That's good for the lifetime of the medium. I think the Linux of LE does as much as it can to avoid writing data back to the storage medium. That's why I would keep a MicroSD for that special Linux.

    Other Linux systems write a lot of temporary data to the permanent storage medium. No problem for SSD, but bad for USB sticks or SD cards.

    appreciate the insight

    • Official Post
    Quote from Iridium

    Personally, I prefer booting from SSD (and I know it is not what the question asked) As you have a RPi3 it's possible to boot from USB without a SD card. A USB SSD caddy is about £8 and a 120Gb SSD is around £20 a good alternative to a SD card (Albeit a *bit* more expensive)

    I'm doing that right now, and running the MariaDB server add-on on it for metadata sharing. It looked okay, but there seem to be some incompatibilities with my USB/SSD combo and the Rpi 3B+. It either seems to only cache files and not actually store them... (a newer Linux kernel issue??). Also, returning to the last watched video in a listing does't work all the time.

    AFAICT, this didn't happen when I used the full Raspbian setup, so I may go back to that solution.

    And, LE's MariaDB addon seems to have a quirk with the "Recently added TV episodes".It has a weird time-out problem. The regular MySQL server doesn't seem to have a problem with those.