[magicalhippo]

> I know that you didn't ask, but my $0.02 is that yes, RasPi's are unreliable.

I've been using RPis and "clones" for internal services for years, and there's hardly any fuzz with them at all. At most a power cycle once a year.

They've endured house losing power multiple times, I've yet to swap SD-card on any of them, they just keep chugging.

But sure, I wouldn't trust my life to one. I just find it odd that people say they're highly unreliable while all of mine just work.

[retrocryptid]

Happy that yours works well. Many problems don't show up until you hit larger numbers.

We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer. We averaged about five reboots per day. On top of that I had to deal with the RasPi Organization's insistence that they were not an ODM. Though these were the RasPi B's and RasPi2 B+'s. I'm sure the reliability has gotten better over the years.

I'm not a big TI fan, but everything I needed I got in a BeagleBone: they're more reliable than RasPi's, you can actually get the firmware source code and they have a "normal" returns process.

I don't have the data for the BBB based cube-sats running Kubos (which was the project after the RasPi project) and there were less than 50 deployed, but I've never heard of any of them rebooting themselves unless the ground told them to do so or there was a battery failure.

[olabyne]

Raspi's are stable if you respect 2 things :

- avoid writes to sd card too much (log2ram mitigates this, alpine in read-only solves this)

- plenty of power (the recent 3 and 4 have huge sipkes of current draw !)

Do you know the reason for your reboots ? Also before the 3+, the die have no RF shield. The B and 2 B+ are exposed if you don't use a metal case with a seperation from the PSU.

[magicalhippo]

> plenty of power

Actually this is a good point I forgot about.

I had one Pi which would reboot or hang every week or so. Dismissed it for a while but then decided to troubleshoot it. I had a USB cable tester, and quickly found that the USB "charging cable" I had bought from a local shop had a 1 Ohm resistance! Threw it away and replaced it with a good one and never had an issue again.

[retrocryptid]

Yes. RasPis are stable except when they're not.

[magicalhippo]

Ok 1k is certainly a sizable fleet, and I only got 3B's or newer.

Nobody imports BeagleBone here so have to get it through DigiKey or similar, which means prices are way higher.

[appleiigs]

> We deployed over 1k RasPi's for a particular customer

Is that the proper tool for the job?? I just read an article saying "Unpopular Opinion: Don't Use a Raspberry Pi for That" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322)

[outworlder]

... what were they doing with 1k Pi's

Please tell me they were using the GPIO pins for something.

[retrocryptid]

Of course. GPIO is the simplest way to get a blinky light.

Seriously though, we used a GPIO pin to stroke the watchdog.

[creeble]

More anecdata: my Open Sprinkler Pi has been running for many years, with only power-fail reboots (maybe once a year). It doesn’t write much to flash, but it’s never needed a reboot because it failed.

[nickthegreek]

My rPi pihole hasn't had a single hiccup for years. Multi power outages and everything. I actually thought it was going to be a way bigger hassle over time but its been smooth sailing.

[fer]

I've had about half a dozen Raspberry Pi in total (only 1 through 3), and many dozens of SBCs, and I found Raspis generally unreliable except for the Raspberry Pi 1 (model B), which is extremely slow for anything nowadays.

The longest I've had running was a The Things Network gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3: OK for 2 years, then it killed the sd card (not corruption, it just wouldn't work anywhere anymore). I set it up again and it killed the new card within a week. Again, and within a month. I gave up and it sucks because the LoRa shield is Raspberry-specific.

A Raspberry Pi 2 died just because while decoding ADS-B. SD was fine.

For the rest of the experiences, I always found some data corruption at some point. Often hanging and needing monthly reboots.

The only worse SBC (and it wasn't really an SBC) I've experienced was the Cubox i4-Pro. I eventually lost it, and I'm almost glad, weekly data corruptions and crashes, underwhelming performance and very fickle behavior overall.

Other <randomfruit> Pis have turd-tier hardware support but whatever you manage to get running tends to be reliable. Pine64 (the oldest model) is so far the only SBC I haven't seen crash, trash an SD card yet, or have FS corruptions yet.

[retrocryptid]

So what you're saying is except for the times it rebooted, it didn't reboot.