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

[Dirk Koopman]

I agree with Howard, especially as regards the SD cards. After all a 
32GB Samsung Pro Endurance is currently £13 on Amazon and a 64GB one is 
£26. But, if you retain the smaller SD card as the root file system - on 
a DXSpider system it is effectively read only except for system log 
files - and then connect an SSD of these parts:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B010SEARPU into a
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N5RLG2C containing something like a
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07G3L3DRK

and you do that BEFORE you boot up your pristine SD card, Raspbian will 
suggest you set that up as the /home partition and suddenly you get a 
lot more storage which is much faster than the builtin SD card. It works 
fine for me. Remember that even with the correct SD card it will still 
wear out "quicker" than a bigger SSD, especially on a busy site with 
lots of connections and normal logging.

I also put the RPi4 into this case which a) keeps it cool and b) is 
enough of a "case" to just stick it on a shelf somewhere and then just 
forget about.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-for-raspberry-pi-4

Hope this helps.

73 Dirk G1TLH


On 30/12/2019 01:35, Howard Leadmon via Dxspider-support wrote:
>   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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>
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