In article ,
 nospam.Kurt.Weiske@f1.n770.z8746.fidonet.org (Kurt Weiske) writes:
>
> 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?

I have several original Pi 1's which have been running 24/7 for almost
5 years. I've never had a card fail in them. The application logs quite
frequently to disk and the writes are flushed. I did change the cards
after around 3 years, just to be safe, and because you can't read how
worn they are.

The main killer for SD cards is losing power during or shortly after
writes. It's not that some filesystem writes are lost (fsck could
repair a filesystem after that). The problem is that the logical to
physical block mapping table which is used for wear leveling is lost
or corrupted by the embedded controller, and this has the effect of
shuffling a large number of blocks on the disk. This sort of corruption
is not repairable by fsck, at least, not without losing substantial
data from the disk, and not just data which you were recently writing.

If you do loads of writing to an SD card, you will eventually wear
out the flash, but I've never had one fail that way.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

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