[danparsonson]

Flash memory generally doesn't have great lifespan for repeated writes; using it as a root device is going to kill it pretty quickly. I had a similar problem once running a NAS off a USB stick; within a year of so the stick would no longer accept new data and I swapped it out for an SSD instead.

[inigyou]

Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

[tuatoru]

Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

Let alone things like putting /var/tmp and/or /var/log in RAM, or long commit intervals.

No idea what the current situation is; Pis are too dear for the likes of me now.

[PunchyHamster]

> Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

relatime is a default for a while now, like decade+, you don't need to set up mount option just to get relatime

[whartung]

Are there other computers that run off of SD cards long term successfully that are not Raspberry Pi’s?

[Palomides]

I work on embedded linux machines that go a decade plus in active use with micro sd cards, it's not a problem at all

[Nextgrid]

I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

[DJBunnies]

I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies.

It really is a high failure rate.

[marysol5]

"Enterprise" Boot SD's in servers love to die.

More than likely due to being in a warm box...

[mattrighetti]

Do pis have an official power supply?

[marcosdumay]

I've had enough SD and micro-SD cards die on phones and cameras to doubt that is the only problem.

People probably see more of a problem on raspberry pis because they write more to the memory than other systems.

[marysol5]

Reminds me of years ago, I had to send a load of photos to a client of something I'd travelled 5 hours to photograph.

Didn't even check, just took and sent. Then went back.

Only to find that the SD card in the phone was dying, and every image was corrupted from about 1/3 down...

[ErroneousBosh]

It's actually weird that Raspberry Pis seem so bad at using SD cards.

I've just scrapped a large PBX which had a whopping 8MB SD card in it. Its 486 processor booted Linux off the SD card, it wrote CDRs to the SD card, it served said CDRs up over a web interface off it, it saved its logs to the card, and all the other day-to-day chatter of a running system.

It was installed pretty much 20 years ago. The date sticker on the SD card shows that it was replaced 18 years ago, presumably as part of an upgrade.

[SahAssar]

I'm going to guess that it was not a normal COTS SD card, and instead designed for continuous writes.

The factors for SD card failures in raspberry pi seem to be mostly SD cards not meant for the purpose and having things like swap, atime or disk logs enabled which leads to unnecessary writes.

[ErroneousBosh]

It just appears to be a pretty standard Sandisk SD card.

[marysol5]

Because of a properly configured, boot disk. Just boots once per power cycle.

Meanwhile something like the pi, on most images, is writing logs to the storage CONSTANTLY. Not to mention is regularly booted.

[ErroneousBosh]

This was constantly writing to the SD card. It was the only storage on the device.

Rebooting it was a big deal though, so that rarely happened.

[Spooky23]

We “lost” a signage device in a facility we were doing an IoT refresh on.

It was an old wyse terminal, and at some point a CF adapter with an SD card was added, and a construction project buried it inside of a block wall. lol. It’s still there.

[marysol5]

Been there before, the amount of times when you're in shared spaces that you come one day to find your kit disconnected, or even outright buried.

We came one day to a plant room where our rack was, to find it was in an entirely different "room", with a locked door....

[close04]

I’ve had the same issues in the Pi1-3 era, can’t say for sure if it was the Pi, the SD card, or the software running on top (HA was a big culprit). The last issues were probably before 2018-2018. Since then I don’t remember having any failure and I have a bunch of Pi3s and 4s running with flawlessly for about that long, including HA.

Since then I’ve been careful to buy high quality cards, oversized them a bit, optimize the OS and apps with regards to writes (like no unnecessary logging), and paid attention to airflow. The software probably also evolved to fix the issues.

[mDyJzDPmBdG]

I found GoPros to cook SD cards from time to time. It makes me wonder if normal sized SD are still manufactured and are they more resistant. For years in stores I only saw miro SD with adapter to full size.