[GordonS]

As this point, it's practically a meme.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these devices in over 5 years. Not one - and they boot from SD cards!

The stuff running on the RPis isn't very write heavy, and the cases are only lightly ruggedised (I forget the brand, but they are consumer gear, nothing fancy), and I forget what brand the SD cards are - but this is why I roll my eyes every time this is mentioned on HN (which is every time RPi is mentioned on HN). I really wonder what fraction of people repeating this reliability claim even have an RPi.

[thunfischbrot]

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take great care.

Younger generations have not had these issues for me. While I assigned that to my experience, usually reducing logging to sd card, booting off of USB and fewer unexpected power losses, it may simply not be an issue any more.

[sdlion]

> Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss

Though in my experience as a technician installing 2.5" consumer grade / entry level Kingston/ADATA SSD to several clients, this is what generally will kill NAND flash devices, it's not an exclusive phenomenon to uSD cards.

I have a few running RPi's on premises for years. Ranging from v1 to now v4, certainly the only uSD 3 failures I have had has been with the early models and reliability went up with...... just a No-break power source. Just that.

It seems a lot of people think a sudden power loss it's what's only dangerous for electronics and NAND flash devices but for devices that are highly sensitive to browning down power rails (specially those first v1 raspis) any unstable power source is a rave party from which is hard to get out unscathed.

[prox]

One of the first things I bought for my Raspberry was a battery hat, it’s great. When the power goes out, it keeps on trucking. I would love to add a solar panel or wind turbine as an extra power source.

[sdlion]

Yeah! That has been my idea for a long time! When thought about it, I began looking into devices that can output DC and charge a backup battery but with a variety of input power sources, Solar as main source and line AC as backup. Didn't get that many practical search results.

But it seems what I was looking for are boat chargers. They're meant to provide energy through solar/battery and charge at the same time while parked on a deck. Didn't followed it up though.

[outworlder]

Not sure how good wear leveling is across brands of SD cards, but given the much larger SD cards available today, it may be a factor.

[callesgg]

Yeah i have the same experience with about 100 pi’s. But I still added a mitigation making the log directory a overlayfs with tempfs underneath.

I think that reduced the number of writes to the sd card allot.

[bekindandopen]

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"?

I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

[lifeisstillgood]

Many have tried but sadly there is a limited supply of skilled Jawa Programmers.

I tried to hire some to start such a project but I must have been looking in Alderaan places ...

[GordonS]

Heh, it's nothing so fancy. There are a bunch of different types of land rig: some small ones come apart and get stuffed in the back of vans/lorries, others sit on a trailer, and some are self-propelled[0] [1].

Of course, it's not just 1 piece of equipment that moves around it's people, tech etc - some land rigs are almost semi-nomadic, with the whole camp moving around.

[0] https://www.nov.com/products/mobile-rigs

[1] https://www.nov.com/-/media/nov/files/products/rig/rig-equip...