End of 8GB microSD cards...?

General
1

I don't know about you, but I'm finding it difficult to locate an actual 8GB microSD card these days in brick-and-mortar stores.

There was a time recently when I could buy either 4GB or 8GB varieties somewhere in the $7 or less price range. Now at Fry's Electronics today, the 16GB cards are about $4.99 at the low end and none of the pegs for the lower-capacity adapters have any product whatsoever.

I spoke with the guy who runs "the cage" of spill-over products there and he really didn't seem to understand the need for lower-capacity cards like this. I educated him a bit so maybe he could make different buying decisions in the future. He seemed to suggest that the manufacturers themselves aren't shipping them anymore; they've had an open order to refill these but the product just doesn't arrive.

I just bought eight more of the cards direct from the manufacturer's website just now but I thought I'd throw this out there that you might want to stock up if you're seeing the same trend. The bigger cards in theory would be a better deal but the reality is that if you're publishing an ISO then you want the least worries for yourself and the person who later downloads it. Yes, there are ways of shrinking the second partition but I consider my time into the activity; I'd rather not go there.

2

What devices do you have with an 8gb limit?

3

When producing IMG files for custom OctoPrint installations, for example, you try to make it compatible with your audience. Ultimately, the 4GB would be the way to go for compatibility with your downstream customer (noting that an OctoPi script will auto-expand to fit what they have upon first bootup). But the 4GB is becoming impossible to find as well.

I also do a fair amount of images which include the PIXEL Desktop so the 8GB seems to be the nominal microSD size as the base.

Another component of this is that I routinely make weekly backups of my working microSD image. During "dangerous" activities, I'll not compress those and each one eats up an 8GB file on some computer or device I have. But they're exceedingly handy as I sometimes revert back to those backups when, say, qt.io didn't pan out.

4

Gotcha. So more for testing than true "the gopro will not record to anything larger than 2gb".

I don't miss having a sony digital camera where the solution to "more memory" was the equivalent of "flip the floppy disk over".

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Use rsync for backups. It only backs up the used portion of the system, not the empty parts of the partition

6

I suppose. But then what if I want to revert back to the 20190126 image? Rsync is one-deep. It's a good tool, though. I use it every (about) ten minutes during development.

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I am also not a friend of oversized SD Cards. I use dd for automated backups once a month and in addition , do a second copy with win32diskimager on occasion...for instance before applying major upgrade. Thus i keep around half a dozen of images , from each Octoprint..meanwhile counting up to 3 .
Assuming that usually 12 GB are wasted, this is good 150GB wasted Storage.. BUT: pishrink.sh is the solution .. i backup, immediately run it after on the image in the LAN and all waste is away..

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I know about pishrink but unfortunately neither macOS nor Windows can work with ext4 partitions so I'd have to boot up an Ubuntu laptop, transfer things over there and it starts to be another case of expending unnecessary labor versus starting with smaller physical drives in the first place. <_<

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I was on a local store they still sell 1 GB 2 GB 4 GB and also 8GB micro and normal sized SD cards :smiley:

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10

i run pishrink FROM the OCTOPI ( SSH Shell ) ... having mounted the local NAS where the backups are stored...

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I would sure make things a heck of a lot easier if the administrators of OctoPrint were to port the program over to Internet of Things in lieu of Raspbian Desktop or Raspbian Linux. This in itself would allow OctoPrint to run as a Windows Network Node.

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@Ronald_Lambier I'm not entirely sure what the size of available SD cards has to do with whatever you are talking about here but: It's open source, if you feel something is missing feel free to look into that and propose a patch.

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You would think that a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian would pretty much define IoT, honestly.

Guy's OctoPi image directly works on the Pi. OctoPrint itself can be installed on workstation type of PCs and a variety of single-board computers to include Pi competitors on Linux of some sort. I would hazard a guess that even the Yocto-derived version of Linux could be made to work on an Intel Edison chip, for example.

It does. If you're having difficulties using the hostname to reach it, I'd treat this as a name resolution problem. But it's probably best to open a thread over in the Get Help section if so.

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I finally got Version 1.6 Beta to work instead of Version 1.5. Though it does have an annoying Bug within it that causes the Raspberry Pi B+ to reboot itself continuously whenever you attempt to Install a Plugin or do an Update. Other than the fact that I am now stuck porting it to my Cellular Devices because of an apparent VPN. It is working Flawlessly. I now need to learn how to get around this issue and it's going to be difficult as I am a Dumbass when it comes to networking. And I am running it just fine on a 128GB Micro-SD Card Class 10.

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I just bought eight of those 8GB microSD cards from the manufacturer themselves... Imagine how big of a file on your hard drive it would take to backup that 128GB microSD.