Extending life of sd cards on rbpi/odroid platforms

Hi guys,

I’m thinking to move /var partition to HDD from sdcard to extend life of sd card where I have Linux system.

Do you have any other suggestions how to extend life of sd cards to prevent failure and loosing system data?


Regards,
demeo

I personally do not care too much about life of the SD card. My raspi3 working more than 2 years without problems. Storagenode’s logs are redirected to the HDD, so there is not much activity on the SD card.
If it’s die - I’ll buy another one in the nearest shop, flash the image and setup the docker. The script for running the storagenode and watchtower is placed on HDD also, the identity on the same HDD too. So it’s about a hour of maintenance.
However, it’s not an advise it’s my personal opinion. It could be better to setup a bootable HDD though. And I think someone did it already. I just were too lazy to search for a hack :slight_smile: and thus took an easy way

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I’m in the same boat here! :wink:

Although the latest RPi OS is supposed to natively support booting from an external drive, but I never took the time to try it out.
I will when my current cheap SD dies ^^

There is one thing I did though to go easy on the SD card: I disabled Swap.

@demeo All that said, I did write a detailed Readme explaining all steps to setup my nodes, my disks, and so on… All that synchronized on a gitlab repo so setting up again my Rpi (should the SD card die) is quick and straight forward. Happened to me once (wasn’t because of the SD) and it only took me 20~30 minutes to resetup the whole thing.
I thought it was neat :slight_smile:

If you’re interested, there is a public version of this readme there you can check out, it might contain one or two useful tips. However I wouldn’t recommand using the utility script that comes with it, it’s a home cooked SH thingy I wrote to help me manage my nodes, but I can’t guaranty it works well! Here:

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USB boot is pretty standard now. The last ubuntu image I downloaded…unzip, dd straight to the hdd. It even worked GPT out.

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yep, most of my rpi4s running storj nodes are running off of low-capacity, external 2.5" SSDs. The decision was partially because of the sd card wear/tear, but mostly because I am impatient with the sd card read/write speeds…