[Dxspider-support] RPI 4 settings for reduced writes to SD card

[Michael Walker]

Hi

I have had class 10 cards fail in much less than a year on 2 weather
stations.  I can't tell you why, but the file system did go read only on
each of them.

I also routinely turn off the Swap storage if I know that I will never
surpass the RAM storage available without issue.  Since my RPI's are built
for a single purpose they don't come close to over running maximum RAM.

I really don't require the /data directory, so I will move that to a
ramdisk.  Should I ever need it, I can turn it back on to debug as
required.   I managed to go 5 years without looking at it at all.  :)  The
DXSpider code is pretty solid so it is rare it might be needed.

I found log2ram some time ago https://github.com/azlux/log2ram and that
made it pretty easy to configure.

Thanks for the input.  Mike va3mw


On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 6:55 PM JOSEPH REED <joe at n9jr.com> wrote:

> A Class 10 SD card doesn’t fail in 6-9 months, but it will fail.  You have
> two USB 3 ports on the Pi 4.  The best and easiest way I know it to acquire
> an inexpensive USB SSD drive.  Attach it and clone the SD to the SSD but
> with different partition IDs.  Edit /boot/boot.txt and replace the
> partition ID of rootfs with the rootfs partition of the SSD.  You will boot
> from the SD, but after boot everything is on the SSD.
>
> And you do not want to turn off swap!
>
> Joe N9JR
>
>
>
> On Mar 30, 2020, at 7:36 AM, Michael Walker via Dxspider-support <
> dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi All
>
> A few weeks ago I moved my Cluster over to a RPI4 where it hums along
> nicely.
>
> I know from many weather stations that the SD card will go into a read
> only state in about 6-9 months as writes start to fail.  Running IOTOP
> tells me what we do significant writes to the card.
>
> Does anyone have a list of things they do to minimize the writes?
>
> On my list I have:
>
>
>    1. Turn off the swap space
>    2. Move /spider/data to a RAM disk
>
> Anything else?
>
>
>
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