Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Nextgrid 13 days ago
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.
2 comments
DJBunnies 13 days ago
I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies.

It really is a high failure rate.

link
marysol5 12 days ago
"Enterprise" Boot SD's in servers love to die.

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

link
mattrighetti 13 days ago
Do pis have an official power supply?
link
rmunn 12 days ago
Yes. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply/

I have always bought the official power supply, yet of the two Pi 3s that I have connected to my TV at home, the one that runs Kodi/OSMC to serve up movies has never suffered any filesystem corruption, despite it suffering repeated power outages without warning (it's low enough to the ground that the toddler has often pulled the power cable out, and I haven't been able to find a better place to keep it). The other one, bought at the same time from the same source, is meant to be the one the kids use for programming in Snap!, a variant of MIT Scratch that doesn't have the artificial limitations that Scratch has. (Snap! functions — the exclamation mark is part of the name — can take lists as input, whereas Scratch functions can only take numbers or strings, giving it an artificial ceiling; also, Snap! functions can take functions as input and return functions, making higher-order programming possible, while Scratch deliberately does not allow that). However, that Raspberry Pi has suffered two SD card failures in the past year; it's been down more often than it's been up, and I've ended up using either my laptop or my wife's laptop for my kids' programming lessons.

link
marcosdumay 13 days ago
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.

link
marysol5 12 days ago
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...

link