[Dxspider-support] Running DX Spider on a Raspberry PI 4 USB SSD Drive

[Howard Leadmon]

   Well I am sure some wouldn't agree, and I will admit that I haven't 
used a Pi4 to run a cluster node, as I have my cluster on a real 
rackmount server.   That said I have built dozens of Pi4's to put out in 
the field for network testing, so have a few dozen under my hat at this 
time.

  What I have done as far as storage is to use the built in MicroSD 
slot, as it just boots, but I have been using the Samsung Pro Endurance 
cards to buid the Pi's, and this is my reasoning behind this choice.   
If you look they can take a lot more writes before they fail than the 
typical card, as they are designed for video recording.   Also when you 
look at the Pro or EVO models, they have fast reads, but in moments the 
writes throttle back.   With the Pro Endurance they will sustain an 80mb 
read rate, but unlike most cards they will sustain a 30mb write rate 
pretty much non-stop, as I write out images to the cards to start out 
each new one ready to run, so kick it 64gb to start.   This has worked 
fantastic for me on about a dozen Pi4's so far, and yes you can do other 
things that will run even faster, but for simple and reliable which I 
need at remote locations, it just works!

  Also if your setting up a Pi4, make sure that you load the firmware 
updater for Raspbian (debian) that will update your firmware if it's 
behind, as it will make your pi4 run cooler, and be less likely to 
throttle, which is always a good thing..


73's de WB3FFV...


---
Howard Leadmon - howard at leadmon.net
PBW Communications, LLC
http://www.pbwcomm.com

On 12/29/2019 7:14 PM, Joe Reed via Dxspider-support wrote:
> In anticipation of the failure of the Class 10 SD card that has been 
> running my DX Cluster for a number of years I decided to bite the 
> bullet and move from a Pi 2B to a Pi 4 B with 4 GB of Ram and use a 
> USB 3 compatible SSD drive.  Wow, the Internet is filled with bad 
> information.  I found some hits that had me change the fstab which 
> made no sense.  And a number of other interesting posts which provided 
> a great deal of entertainment and opportunities to reformat the SD.
>
> Then I found this You Tube video: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rglzPdsvYg OMG!  Copy the SD card to 
> the SDD with unique partition IDs, execute blkid to get the partUUID 
> for the SSD and edit /boot/cmdline.txt to change the root file system 
> partUUID to that of the SSD.  So simple, so logical.
>
> Posted as an informational reference.
>
> Joe Reed
> joe at n9jr.com <mailto:joe at n9jr.com>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk
> https://mailman.tobit.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/dxspider-support

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