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dxrobertson

Member

Registered: 2017-05-04

Posts: 232  

SDHC Nothing but Problems

I have been trying to test out the use of an SDHC card for use as the primary drive for the Devuan OS.  The SDHC card is using and adapter to "make" it an SD card.  No problems with the drive recognition, installing Devuan, booting, etc. 

But with minimal use, the SDHC drive starts experiences disk errors.  fsck needs to be run and several errors are reported such as inode problems.  I can see this might be somewhat normal maybe 1 time.  But this has happened several times.  And at some point the OS becomes unusable due to so many fsck corrected problems.

Seeking someone with personal experience with SDHC.  This is a new PNY SDHC card.  I can only assume it must be defective?  Should use of SDHC in an adapter be more stable than what I am experiencing?   Am I an idiot for trying to boot an OS on an SDHC card?  Not asking for ways to fix, more do I need to return this card and try another, or put an end to this endeavor.

Last edited by dxrobertson (2019-06-19 23:49:24)

Dutch_Master

Member

Registered: 2018-05-31

Posts: 286  

Re: SDHC Nothing but Problems

SD cards only have a limited number of read/write cycles due to the Flash memory they use. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has modified/optimized Raspbian to minimize this and thus don't suffer as much. Devuan isn't. Depending on your definition of "new" I'd suggest claiming it as a defective card from the manufacturer/supplier.

Panopticon

Member

Registered: 2018-01-27

Posts: 306  

Re: SDHC Nothing but Problems

You could try the f2fs file system which is made for flash based storage drives.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast1 … tation/lee

usb 3.0 would be a better medium i think for what Dutch_Master points out about sd cards.

If using EXT4 you should probably disable the journal and improve the file system performance as mentioned in the link below but that comes at a cost for system stability.I really dont think it would be worth it on an sdhc card.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ex … erformance

Last edited by Panopticon (2019-06-20 08:29:38)

kuleszdl

Member

Registered: 2018-11-03

Posts: 107  

Re: SDHC Nothing but Problems

It also depends quite a bit on the particular sdcard you use as well. I had one card running as primary data and system partition with f2fs on Android (back in the days when this was possible until Android 7 came along), and while one card had issues the other one worked like a charm for more than one year.

In general, you'll want a card with a decent 4k random write performance, so it finished write operations fast and does not heat up too much. When doing benchmarks of various flash media, I had two (quite old) cards that died due to the stress from the benchmarks. Just in case you're interested, you can find the benchmarks here:

https://www.kulesz.me/post/055-benchmark-microsd/

pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 216  

Re: SDHC Nothing but Problems

This info may help:

SSD’s, Journaling, and noatime/relatime
https://tytso.livejournal.com/61830.html

Improving the Resilience of HDDs & Ext4
https://myles.sh/improving-the-resilience-of-your-hdds/
[Especially the section on tuning ext4.]

Phil

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