Rasp PI: how long is the lifetime of a SD card 16GB with RASPBIAN?

Hello,

I had to re-install raspbian on a new SD card since it did not boot anymore (I still have to serach what happens to the card; probably it is dead).
The Card is a Transcend Extreme-Speed SDHC 16GB Class 10
The raspberry PI is used as print and data server and has maximum 1x on/off per day.
My impression is the SD card has to be changed from time to time (because swap on /var/..?).

How is the experience here? how long is the lifetime of a SD card on a PI with RASPBIAN? Perhaps I will have to move to another hardware with enough RAM and a small HDD (swap only) for avoiding 10€ cards from time to time.

Another question: how to copy a SD card to another (EVERYTHING: boot flag, structure, size.. ): I will make now a backup SD card if the new one, I am using now, dies again.

And last question: what cheap hardware and low consumption would you suggest in replacement of my PI? I have here old boxes but it is too big and the noise/consumption is not so good.

Thanks a lot.

you can attach a hard disk to the pi too, using an usb slot. The life of the sd card depends on the usage, therefore hard to say anything. You can use the command dd to save the content of the sd card . And finally there are a lot of different boxes out there, like banana pi, cubieboard .... Just check what do you really need (some of them have sata ports too)

Hi,

If you do connect a external USB drive to the Rpi then be sure to use a powered USB hub or you will experience issues using just the Rpi USB as power source for the external drive since that will exceed the Rpi power available.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

I have 3 Pis and one of them has had issues with its SD card, the other have had no issues. See "Usage" below. The troublesome machine is the most heavily used. So I back up often. I have had 2 card failures. One was completely DOA, not just corrupted. There does not appear to be any regularity to it. I suspect variation in card quality the issue.

The raspberrypi forums have lots of discussion about card problems. In my opinion, they fall into three areas in decreasing causes: mechanical, card quality and usage.

Mechanical: Most issues are when cards get "bowed" and do not make good contact with the Pi's card holder. Sometimes cleaning the contacts or bending the card will correct it. I have read where some user add shims to force contact.

Quality: Lots of reports of cheap cards or faked brand name cards failing. Caution as to whether that great on-line deal was really a good one.

Usage: Older Pi firmware did have some issue causing rare card corruption. Supposedly this has been fixed. There are some reports that powering off with out doing a shutdown could cause corruption. Try to minimize this occurrence. Finally there is some concern that high usage is not what these cards were designed for. Use a HDD for very active volumes.

As suggested by others, you should install an external HDD, meaning a real hard drive (magnetic storage media) via USB and power that externally because the Pi will not be able to power the HDD properly.

Also as stated, the lifetime of cards will vary according to manufacturing quality, and also usage. Likely the usage is the more important number. Perhaps there are some cards of very poor quality, which therefore will fail soon no matter what, but in general the quality of these cards are pretty fair and therefore uniformly high in the amount of write cycles. The usage is then the problem.

Set it up so that it boots off of the SD card, no swap, put your RFS on the external HDD and I think you'll find that the disk lasts better, plus any potential data loss will be restricted to the quality and endurance of the HDD which will be much better long term.