Death of a microSD

General
1

I've been using this same microSD card throughout most of my development this year. You can assume that it's been fairly abused in sheer number of reads/writes.

That said, I think it's just... sort of... died. Having replaced it this morning, the system is coming up happily and without the usual fits each morning.

The last two weeks have been one problem or another upon first (few) boot attempts.

What's odd is the sheer variety of hiccups and errors that this seemingly caused. It's not as if it presented itself as the same problem twice, to be honest. I don't recall seeing a suggestion to fsck the ext4 partition so I don't think this is technically file system corruption.

  • Replaced the Raspberry Pi 3B ("yay, it's behaving... that must have been it")
  • Replaced the 5V adapter ("ah, it was the adapter that was the problem")
  • Replaced the microSD card ("grumble... grumble...")

Earlier, I was getting things like...

  • freeze-up at the four-raspberries stage of the boot
  • freeze-up at some odd stage of booting but before networking was up
  • failure to present a Window provider to Kivy
  • Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000001b
  • Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address e24dd028
  • and many more

So I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the microSD card can just flake out after so much use.

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1 Like
3

My thought :sunglasses:

4

microsd are a rubbish device for computer storage, they are just small and cheap.

5

So - what alternative?

You can be unfortunate to get all the bugged ones.
Those I use never had an issue...

6

There are a number of issues. One the market is flooded with fake, poor quality sdcards, available on ebay, amazon market place etc. But even then sdcards are designed for embedded devices, cameras and smart phones.

The equivalent storage for a computer is a Solid State Drive, which are way bigger and more complex. But they are designed for the purpose. They balance writes, mark off corrupt blocks etc.

Not sure if it is out, but they were updating the Raspberry pi firmware so you can boot it from a proper SSD drive. But this doesnt really help octopi where you don't want a large external drive hanging from your printer.

So the only real octopi solution is ... backup, backup and then backup.

1 Like
7

Keep in mind that the SSD or other external drives require more power.

Personally, I buy microSD cards direct from Unirex.com, for what it's worth.