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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that be a problem with what you're running on the pi and how it uses the card? Or is it not a use thing and it's actually frying the cards somehow?

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SD cards can die within a few months through repeated power cycling, or writing logs to disk instead of to RAM. There are techniques that one can use to lengthen SD card life, but the average person buying a Pi and slapping a media-center distro on there might not know about them or be willing to e.g. invest in an UPS and use the command line to hack logging.

Yeah, I know about wear leveling and maximum writes, which is why I mentioned what you rub on the pi. These days anything meant to be a device os that doesn't make allowances for the non-vilatile memory it will likely be running in (even if just the base is and not media mounts) as needed in some way is really doing users a disservice.

The power cycling is new to me though. Is that also based on bad defaults (e.g. not using noatime mount option etc.) or is it actually based on power? Because that seems weird given their designed use case (constantly getting and losing power as they go in and out of devices).

I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/

While the logging issue might be solved on LibreELEC, writes to the Kodi database can be just as bad in the near long-term.

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