Hacker News Reader

Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

Half of the post is about SD cards, wear, data loss and reliability. Just use SSD?

Before I opened the article I was thinking "Don't use an SD card. Don't use an SD card. Don't use an SD card."

People don't understand that 90% of the SD card problems are power related (only relevant if you don't use the official power supply) and 10% are simply because of poor SD card quality.

People haven't gotten the message that a charger has lower QC standards since an interruption of the charging process does not shut the device down. A bug that leads to a few milliseconds of power loss will pass QC, but also corrupt your SD card.

Penny drops. Yes this jives much better with the observed data -- that Rpi break SD cards orders of magnitude more than anything else that uses SD cards no matter how crappy said cards are.

Problem could have been solved by adding a decent sized capacitor on the 5v supply rail.

> that Rpi break SD cards orders of magnitude more than anything else that uses SD cards

I think if you take into account how often they're powered on you'd find cameras destroy flash memory cards comparably to Raspberry Pis.

> Problem could have been solved by adding a decent sized capacitor on the 5v supply rail.

Or you could just buy the Raspberry Pi branded power supply.

Are SSDs less prone to corruption than SD cards when power drops for those milliseconds?

I was expecting that to be tip #1 indeed. And it’s why I went to a Nuc eventually. Choose a nice ssd and it will really run for years and years.

Nucs also tend to win on performance, software compatibility/upkeep (yay commodity x86), price per performance, and often price outright (pis aren't really $35 if you get a newer/better model and once you buy storage/power/case). AFAICT pis only consistently win on power consumption, and that only just (x86 can get well under 10W, you just have to get the right model)

Do you have recommendations for a NUC to replace a raspberry pi that draws around 10W when idle?

Have a look at the Beelink SER5, idle around 5W and its quite affordable

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Ryzen-5-5560U-performance-debu...

The Intel N95 and N100 NUCs are amazingly efficient.

And possibly one as silent as a fanless pi4 ?

Thin clients are also an option.

Similar power consumption but power and case/cooling/storage is included.

Depending on what you choose you get eMMC or SATA or M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe for storage.

For anyone that is interested: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

You can also use a Raspberry Pi compute module in an appropriate carrier. I use the CM4 for work and consequently it’s all I use at home too. Lovely versatile device that fits in whatever carrier you want (including one that mocks a regular pi) and it has industrial grade flash.

Do you have any recommendations for a carrier?

I use this minimal one. Check out what Waveshare has to offer too.

https://sourcekit.cc/#/

Thanks… my ideal would be a similar sized carrier with PoE and M2 support

Think I really want something like the Uptime Labs Blade https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

What's a carrier in that context ?

An IO board that adds the IO ports that the e.g. CM4 lacks. There's a decent range of them from different suppliers, but Raspberry Pi have one themselves called "Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 IO Board".

Thanks !

Maybe professional bias but I prefer to follow a cattle vs pets approach here and treat them as disposable, meaning: let the sd card break and optimize for quick replacement.

NVMe SSDs cost the same as SD cards nowadays. You can treat the SSDs as disposable if you want, but you are going to quickly realize that this mindset isn't exactly actionable, because there is nothing that needs disposing of.

Current Pi 4s & 5s support booting from USB out of the box with no configuration (took them long enough), so I don't think it's worth the downtime and wasted SD cards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com