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by thunfischbrot 1925 days ago
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.
2 comments
sdlion 1925 days ago
> 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.

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prox 1925 days ago
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.
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sdlion 1923 days ago
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.

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outworlder 1925 days ago
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.
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