[talk] SD cards for Pi?

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

I know there are a ton of ARM fans here running various Pi clones and such…  I had a model B sitting around and I decided that I’d move my znc proxy and ssh/tmux jumphost off of my big media server and onto the Pi.  I have a UPS, and like to let the big server shutdown 10 minutes into a power outage, and then just let the rest of the stuff run until the battery is near death.  So the Pi looked like a nice option that would take very little power.  I installed FreeBSD 11.1/ARM on there and installed a few packages, all was well for about 8 months.

Last night, the Pi disappeared.  Today I looked at it and on checking the SD card, it seemed dead. Laptop recognized it, but no partition table and any attempt to dd things from or to it failed with an IO error.  

So two questions:

- At a local Walgreens or Staples, what’s a decent SD card?  I know nothing of these things.
- Is there any tweaking I should have done to FreeBSD to make it not write excessively to the card (I did not have swap enabled)?

Thanks,

Charles

PS - Ike, I dropped the OS-X thread not out of frustration, but more like it’s too long of a convo to have via email.  I’ll say this though - anyone still using OS-X, take a look at iTerm and the tmux integration feature, it’s awesome.