Preventing corrupt SD

[rastam4n]

I use an older version of this one... not sure why they have discontinued the one I have is an X855 for RPi4b.
https://geekworm.com/collections/nas-sto...pi-4b-only
and I use a this hat for cooling... my Moitessier hat (imu) is mounted a safe distance away using jumpers.
https://geekworm.com/products/raspberry-...8afa&_ss=r

They reason I use that hat is to allow me to have multiple options for sending power directly into the GPIO pins and it has a jumper to power the msata USB card

Thanks for the details- that's a ninteresting setup. Shame it doesn't take 12V in..

Did I understand you use these in combination with a Moitessier? That's even better! Any idea what your power consumption is, with this setup? (I currently draw about 0.7 A including a 7"screen, an Argon1 casing, the Moitessier and an SSD on a USB3 adapter)

Yes I use the Moitessier hat but I have it mounted on a board off to the side and use jumper wires to connect it to the RPi because of the interference from the fan... I do not know what my power consumption is but I am getting some under voltage warnings so I think I will power the ssd separately and see how that helps

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Do you also use the case of geekworm? If so, how does your IMU perform within the metal casing?

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God, now I wanna buy everything from geekworm

No I don't use the case, i just mounted the ssd card, rpi and fan hat stacked to a board... and I mount the Moiteisser hat a few inches away to reduce interference. 


I thought the case was aluminum? which should not interfere? 

I now right? they have a lot of nice stuff. Really gets you thinking about how else to use the RPI

[abarrow]

I agree on your assessment of Geekworm stuff. Really nice. I just put together a system using their X710 power board, which allows a wide range of input power. It does have a couple of 5V outputs, switched and unswitched. I really like their pushbutton shutdown and reboot feature.

[rastam4n]

I agree on your assessment of Geekworm stuff. Really nice. I just put together a system using their X710 power board, which allows a wide range of input power. It does have a couple of 5V outputs, switched and unswitched. I really like their pushbutton shutdown and reboot feature.

Oh wow I didn't even see that board! That is the answer to my under voltage, I can just feed it 12 volts directly!

[jamos.tan@gmail.com]

Do I read correctly that this board can do 17amps with mosfet!?

[fishy]

I agree on your assessment of Geekworm stuff. Really nice. I just put together a system using their X710 power board, which allows a wide range of input power. It does have a couple of 5V outputs, switched and unswitched. I really like their pushbutton shutdown and reboot feature.

Oh wow I didn't even see that board! That is the answer to my under voltage, I can just feed it 12 volts directly!

Just ordered   Now looking for a solution for my 2.5"SATA ssd drives. Maybe only a USB adapter... All the Geekworm SSD options seem to require external power

[rastam4n]

I agree on your assessment of Geekworm stuff. Really nice. I just put together a system using their X710 power board, which allows a wide range of input power. It does have a couple of 5V outputs, switched and unswitched. I really like their pushbutton shutdown and reboot feature.

Oh wow I didn't even see that board! That is the answer to my under voltage, I can just feed it 12 volts directly!

Just ordered   Now looking for a solution for my 2.5"SATA ssd drives. Maybe only a USB adapter... All the Geekworm SSD options seem to require external power

If you use one of their power management hats it comes with a jumper wire to power the ssd
sheild or at least it did with the X735 and the X855 sheild I use

[jamos.tan@gmail.com]

Came across this explanation about why SD is not a good idea for continuous writing:

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Here's a good read: http://www.embeddedarm.com/about/resource.php?item=459

I had a loooooooong discussion about this with a colleague of mine after we started seeing boards die.

Basically you're eventually doomed unless you mount the whole disk as read only since the wear leveling algorithms in the flash have no knowledge of what a partition is and will eventually end up with suppesed-to-be-read-only data mixed in with the writable partition erase blocks. If you're writing to flash, it will eventually fail by unfortunate design.

It tooks his previous company 6 months of fighting to come to terms with this in their last product. They had to write data, so eventually used usb flash that the customer could easily replace when things eventually died. They tried every flash card they could get their hands on, read only partitions, etc and eventually had to give up.

Use the SD card you say! Any micro SD card you can put in the slot is absolutely not meant for continuous writing. The SD card spec has a very specific use case in mind (video and images), and logging or using it as a sparse write file system goes completely against the intended SD card design specs. Industrial grade write-tolerant flash will cost you hundreds of dollars more than something on Amazon.

With our current product, I told my boss that I was worried about corruption and that we would eventually go to read only once we debugged the boards. Within two weeks of only log messages, all of our boards started dyeing. The next day, all disks were mounted as read only and issues are debugged with the in-memory log files. We haven't seen any failures in 6 months now.

The easy solution is trying to force the answer of "why are you writing anything to persistent storage?" to be "there's no good reason since it eventually bricks our product". If you want something that will last forever, you will not write to standard flash media. If you can't, then maybe use a usb flash drive (MUCH better life than a micro sd card) and count the days until it corrupts or someone pulls the power at an inopportune time. You could always use a battery backup to get rid of the power off issue. :-\

This is all doom and gloom, but it's a consequence of inconsistent power, buffers, and the destruction nature of quantum tunneling.

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I still didn't understand why SSD could be better, so i did more investigating and came across this: https://serverfault.com/questions/923971...power-loss

In there they say that (S)SD can be safe, if you buy enterprise products which have built-in capacitors with enough power to finish the writing if there should be a power loss. However, this would make the solution a bit more expensive.

At the moment, I feel that SD is more designed for photo's, video's (in our case, marine water charts) and if we want a real stable solution we should configure them as read-only. But, with an OS, or if there are databases present, (cheap) (S)SD is not an option, and just waiting for disaster which will come at some point.

I am beginning to think that SATA will be the next thing then? I'll need to do some more investigating into power usage, because this needs a motor to spin and I will need to see if linux / debian system will cause problems in itself regardless of solid state drives.

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And this article explains the SD power failure completely: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-power-going-down.html

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Edit: this article explains that all disk types can get corrupted when there is power loss: https://www.datanumen.com/blogs/ssd-will...-failures/

So, it's either expensive SSD's, or use a UPS with shutdown command, or use read only mode for the boot sector, like described here: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/qu...e-raspbian

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This instruction for read only seems better: https://medium.com/swlh/make-your-raspbe...558694de79




Edit: Ok, so apparently if you use read-only mode, all desktop functionality will stop. Not sure if webservers, signalk, openplotter apps will be running, but if you use desktop mode this solution will not be feasible.

[abarrow]

I agree on your assessment of Geekworm stuff. Really nice. I just put together a system using their X710 power board, which allows a wide range of input power. It does have a couple of 5V outputs, switched and unswitched. I really like their pushbutton shutdown and reboot feature.

Oh wow I didn't even see that board! That is the answer to my under voltage, I can just feed it 12 volts directly!

Just ordered   Now looking for a solution for my 2.5"SATA ssd drives. Maybe only a USB adapter... All the Geekworm SSD options seem to require external power

I'm using a Geekworm X857 with an mSATA drive. It's powered from the USB port, and works great. You might consider just moving to mSATA - it's smaller and the board powers from the USB port. I think their 2.5 inch drive adapter probably would also, but they included the electronics on that board to use a power switch.

EDIT: I was curious, so I looked at the Geekworm WIKI regarding the X825 2.5 inch drive adapter. They show it as working with their power board, you just don't use the 5V in - you use a jumper to 5V out from the power board to the X825.

[fishy]

I'm using a Geekworm X857 with an mSATA drive. It's powered from the USB port, and works great. You might consider just moving to mSATA - it's smaller and the board powers from the USB port. I think their 2.5 inch drive adapter probably would also, but they included the electronics on that board to use a power switch.

EDIT: I was curious, so I looked at the Geekworm WIKI regarding the X825 2.5 inch drive adapter. They show it as working with their power board, you just don't use the 5V in - you use a jumper to 5V out from the power board to the X825.

Yeah, they pointed me to that same wiki. It's under way as well