PI SDCard reliability

Hund · Apprentice Joined: 18 Jul 2016 Posts: 218 Location: Sweden

I use Alpine Linux on my Raspberry Pi. It runs from the memory and only writes to the SD-card when you tell it to save the changes.

If you don't use the SD-card you shouldn't be able to break it. :)
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ShorTie · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2006 Posts: 101

Just some food for thought
The pi foundation uses the ^huge_file option when they format.
So, like for me, it's a

gtwrek · Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:53 am Post subject:

FWIW, changing my root filesystem on the PI SD card to ext4 (all default options) seems to have solved things for me.
Previously, when my root was f2fs, I had a failure rate of 2/3 (units were my backup operation).

Changing to a new SD Card with ext4, and I've now run 18 iterations of my backup, without problems. Not scientifically rigorous, but that's good enough for me.

I don't know if there's (1) a problem with f2fs, or (2) if there's something wrong with f2fs on the PI, or (3) if there's something wrong with f2fs with a PI using SD cards. But it's not reliable for me and I won't be deploying any with this configuration.

Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2009

Worth reporting as an f2fs bug?
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gtwrek · Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 7:37 pm Post subject:

Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2009

The way to report kernel bugs is to start with the /usr/src/linux/MAINTAINERS file. It contains a description at the top, embedded within which it tells you the "B:" entries list the place to report bugs (though the file is mostly concerned with how to send patches). For F2FS, the MAINTAINERS entry is

Spargeltarzan · Guru Joined: 23 Jul 2017 Posts: 317

Hi,

I have just burned two microSD cards SanDisk Extreme Pro 64gb just by extracting the stage3 to it and performing an emerge --sync in a qemu chroot.
I used the sd card in my notebook with an adapter. The first one came with a badly produced adapter, its write-protection switch was very loose and I was afraid I ruined the card because the switch was neither on or off while using it.

However, I also used f2fs on the cards. I wonder if that can be really the root cause since my cards didn't even touch the RPi but died in the chroot locally.

Once I have read a post from Neddy that modern high-performance cards might be less reliable than weaker classes, but once we have found a card reliable it will be a very long time. I wasn't aware of it and just ordered a fast card since I also want the RPi to be fast believing it will be also reliable.

What is your advice or opinion, should I order a weaker card, or similar but different brand, the same one or just trying to format next time ext4?
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Spargeltarzan

Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
Desktop-PC: Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 280X, ZFS Storage, GNOME openrc, Dantrell, Xen

gtwrek · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2021 4:23 pm Post subject:

Since my Dec 15, post, I've converted 2 of my Pi's from f2fs filesystems on the SD card to ext4. Those systems have been 100% reliable since that time. I do gentoo world upgrade on those systems about 1/week.
I have one other Pi system that's still on f2fs - I've just not updated it because it's hard to get to physically. I'm not doing ANY updates on that system, as I'm quite convinced that doing so will kill the SD Card.

Personally, I'm quite convinced that the original configuration I deployed (with f2fs) is not reliable - although I'm not sure exactly what is the root cause.

Spargeltarzan · Guru Joined: 23 Jul 2017 Posts: 317

Very strange since one would normally believe a filesystem made for sdcards should handle it even better.

Thanks for your response!
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Spargeltarzan

Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
Desktop-PC: Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 280X, ZFS Storage, GNOME openrc, Dantrell, Xen

benjamin3 · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2024 Posts: 1

Hi Everyone,

I have seen a similar problem on other arm hardware and I am wondering if it is caused by this issue:

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3137

Since this topic popped up, I just wanted to say my rpi4 has been running happily for like 2 years by now.
Using f2fs on a relatively bulky, full-metal body pendrive - a deliberate choice hoping for better cooling than plastic body or fingernail-size would offer.

Granted, it runs under a very low load, but still no data corruption so far.
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