On a sunny day (Fri, 11 May 2018 09:20:56 +1200) it happened
nospam.Kurt.Weiske@f1.n770.z8746.fidonet.org (Kurt Weiske) wrote in
:

>
>I'm considering running my BBS on a Raspberry Pi, but haven't ever run a BBS
on
>solid-state media. With 24 hour random read-write access, how long would an SD
>card be expected to last?

Reading data should not be a problem,
SDcard (FLESH memory) has a limited number of write cycles.

There are a number of issues here also related to the operating system,
and file systems used.
First thing is that SDcards have a 'smart' controller that will select a sector
that has not been used before to spread the read / write cycles across the
whole card.
Maybe using a card that is of considerable size will on average increase
lifetime.
The other thing OS related is how the disk is used, if all operations
are performed in memory for example.
Third is that Linux caches a lot of data.

So, and modern SDcards have a huge amount of write cycles specified.

My experience is that with raspies on for several years 24/7,
and some with really heavy load in the sense of at least a sector written every
few minutes,
have _never_ given an error (till now ;-)).
Make backups, always make backups, on a regular basis,
that goes for everything also harddisks.
Sudden power failures can cause problems,
file corruption can have other reasons, backups are essential.
Especially if you are writing experimental code.

You do not say what the data-throughput is on your system,
I would not expect a BBS to be that intensive unless it also stores video and
files,
but you could do the math and use the SDcard specs to get some idea.


Because I never had a problem, and use both old cheap cars and new expensive
cards
I would not worry that much about it.
Just shutdown your raspi by typing 'poweroff' in a terminal and do not just
unplug it,
to make sure all data is written to card.
Battery backup is a nice thing to have too.
A 11.1 V model airplane lipo and a 5V regulator and a diode I have on some
other system here,
Those boards are for sale in many places too, ebay for example.

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