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Comment by mqus | Hacker News Reader

For me its not the 30$ pc that has issues but the 10$ microsd card the os is on. I had to replace it for the third time in about 6 years now.

But this is not something new of course, everybody will tell you to either use good uSD cards or put the os somewhere else, like an external hdd or so.

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Many Raspberry Pi distro spend all the card’s TBW writing /var/log stuffs for no reason. It’s a known issue often attributed to “cheap microSD cards”.

Yes, just to explain why:

microSD cards (and all flash storage) has a limited number of writes. If you let your rpi write logs, you will soon run out of writable space and if you are lucky you end up with a card that is read only. If unlucky it just stops working all toghether.

This is purely an anecdote, but I had to replace a few SD cards in my Pi until I changed power supply. It's not even the official, it's just one that's rated for 5.0 V, 2.5 A. I've used the same card for a few years now.

It's possible to boot from USB with the Pi4, I wouldn't run anything important from the MicroSD.

A common setup is to pull the OS over the LAN and just use usb storage for all your actual stuff. Skip the sd card entirely except maybe as an OS fallback.

Even if direct USB boot does not work out you can just use the SD card to boot the kernel and have the root fs on USB.

With the PI4 you probably can even get better performance from using a USB storage device as it has USB 3.0 Ports.

Go with the high endurance microSD cards. They are only a tiny bit more expensive and last a lot longer. If you’ve got a Pi with USB3 ports, I’d also recommend using an USB3 SSD flash drive for the majority of your writes.

Like the Samsung Edge series for Dashcams/IoT devices? I wish I could get some.

May I ask what fs did you use? Maybe F2FS would extend the life of the flash memory

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