[talk] SD cards for Pi?

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

Word,

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017, at 05:51 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> 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.

SanDisk are my common go-to, as fast as you want to pay for.

They all die, but still sometimes have probs with bootloader on no-brand
stuff.
(Yes, in 2017, still problems here with cheap media.)

> - 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)?

/etc/defaults/rc.conf has a few goodies that recently surprised me, easy
easy memdisk for tmp and var.
Also, disable swap.

--
tmpmfs="AUTO"           # Set to YES to always create an mfs /tmp, NO to
never
tmpsize="20m"           # Size of mfs /tmp if created
tmpmfs_flags="-S"       # Extra mdmfs options for the mfs /tmp
varmfs="AUTO"           # Set to YES to always create an mfs /var, NO to
never
varsize="32m"           # Size of mfs /var if created
varmfs_flags="-S"       # Extra mount options for the mfs /var
mfs_type="auto"         # "md", "tmpfs", "auto" to prefer tmpfs with md
as fallback
populate_var="AUTO"     # Set to YES to always (re)populate /var, NO to
never
--

Next big thing: your application.  Write to a mem disk if it writes
often.

> 
> 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.  

Ha! Indeed.  Next time with drink in hand.

Best,
.ike


> I’ll say this though -
> anyone still using OS-X, take a look at iTerm and the tmux integration
> feature, it’s awesome.
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