We’ve put considerable effort into controlling the amount of writing the emonPi does to an SD card to prolong SD card life. The results seem to be pretty good, we’ve had SD card running for a number of years without any issues. However, there has been occasional reports of SD cards failing premature…

[image] glyn.hudson: However, there has been occasional reports of SD cards failing prematurely. Especially after power cuts. IME, this is because of power spikes. I always run my Pis behind surge protectors.

Do you have any evidence of this? I’m not too sure how this could happen since the Pi is powered by a SMPS which should be able to filter out voltage spikes. If no other equipment in the house is damaged it’s probably unlikely to be a voltage spike. During EMC and CE testing the Pi was subjected to …

No, no evidence, just a worthwhile precaution and one less variable and I’ve never had an SD Card failure due to a power cut. 2 failures, one a very old emoncms setup that was also recording weather data and a second Home Assistant, again a while ago. However, I have never run any of those systems, …

This is something we have been worried about as well. Still not convinced the SLC cards are worth it as there are many other factors affecting performance/durability. There have been a few other developments in this space which are good to be aware of: A lot of the ‘industrial’ part of the industr…

And I would agree with @borpin insofar as if anything is clear its that power supply problems and repowering RPi causes corruption!

That’s Ben, that’s very useful. Part of the challenge is trying to decode all the flashy marketing around SD cards to figure out which have may have benefit to us. Endurance cards aimed at video dashcams may be a good fit for our use case since they will no doubt have a much higher write limit. Wa…

By warranty i was referring more to being warrantied for a certain TBW or hours of use (but probably use in raspberry pi would be in breach of many of these warranties). Ultimately we should expect convergence between SSD and SD in terms of durability and performance. Wear levelling and things like…

The WD Purple QD312 are quite interesting … very high ‘rated’ write durability and they are public about it using wear levelling / ECC (although not in spec sheet). And marketed at ‘IoT’ applications. The Western Digital Industrial IX range I think is basically the same cards but they actually have…

Just looking at the costs of the WD IX range: An 16GB MLC uSD with wear levelling is £14.02 https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/SanDisk/SDSDAF3-016G-XI?qs=%2Fha2pyFaduiUvzAD99ehukB5h8W7B9%2FfZY2Q3n%2BtiD75SOVQfeY7Nw%3D%3D A 16GB SLC uSD with wear levelling is £22.19 https://www.mouser.co.uk/P…

@glyn.hudson Undoubtedly prevention is better than cure. But is prevention of one problem better than a cure for most problems? Could backup be the answer? Any solution will add cost and, as an example, My Memory have a 16 GB USB 3.0 10 MB/s WRITE flash drive for £8 (but not currently in stock). …

SD card durability: Industrial SLC NAND SD cards?

emonSD

borpin (Brian Orpin) 28 September 2020 16:34 2

IME, this is because of power spikes. I always run my Pis behind surge protectors.

SD card failure poll