Use it in read-only mode and have durable writes go to the cloud. Better, have all your software already packaged to the image you'll flash on the SD card.

https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/

I recently spent a little time at a company that used an embedded Pi in their product. It had to have a lot of data on hand that needed refreshing daily, with an unreliable network, so everything had to be local. Their biggest problem was SD corruption.

I worked at a retail company that had video screens up for each department saying who was working in that department now. Because of reasons, all the systems were the same - all the hardware across every machine in every store was the same make and model. Honestly... it was kind of an old machine. Hardware support was buying old hardware off of eBay for spare parts to keep things running.

We (some coworkers and I) back when RPis were becoming more mainstream (6... 7 years ago or so) of converting these systems to RPis. This would free up a dozen systems per store (about 3500 machines) and reduce power consumption per store from 70w/machine (estimate) to 5w/machine. So, lets go with round numbers.

70w * 10 machines = 0.7 KWh; 5w * 10 machines = 0.05 KWh.

Take that to 24h/day and you've got 17 kWh/day. $0.11/ kWh and we're at about $2/day/store... $600/day across all stores for the old systems and $40/day for RPis.

And that's not taking into consideration the hardware and the "ok, we keep a stock of a dozen RPis at each store with SD cards for the different departments and their configuration..."

Anyways... the company didn't go for it at the time. It was rather disappointing for us. It would have been a rather neat project that I still believe could have saved a good bit of money in just electrical costs (and more in hardware costs and longevity). I'm not sure if they've modernized that part of the stores since or if they're still scrounging eBay.

Big/old companies tend to get entrenched in their ways, I see this everywhere as a MSP, spouting idioms like "If it ain't broke don't fix it!" and "There's no need to reinvent the wheel".

Ten years ago I worked at a place that used single board DOS machines for clocking in and out. And this wasn't just at the beginning and end of a shift, this was every time they worked on a new batch of parts. It became very hard to keep these machines operating, you couldn't get spare parts for them anymore without scrounging other machines.

It was a medical device manufacturer, so it wasn't just company inertia holding them back - any change had to go through regulatory compliance. The company was in the midst of replacing their planning and tracking system when I left, and they've changed ownership twice, so I presume they've managed to replace those old systems too. I shudder to think of the problems they're having if they haven't.

I don't completely blame them... just disappointed. They had supply chain problems for their current computers (granted, their own making by not upgrading as time went on) and they were thinking "can we get 10k of these devices? They're all sold out currently... at best, we could get a few hundred, not enough to redo all the current stores if we were to go down this path."

This post couldn't have been more timely. I just bought my first RPI4 to test the feasibility of creating a dual monitor dumb terminal. Last year my small office went 100% remote. Now we want to bring a few people back on a part in-office/part remote rotation. The 'sever' machines are just people's ol desktops and laptops sitting on a wire shelf. Colleagues have used Win RDP to remote from their personal PCs into their Office PCs ('severs'). What do you do when people are in the office part-time? Move the PC to a desk and then put it back on the shelf when they go home so they can work remote tomorrow? YUCK.

That said, I hear PRI4 can boot off USB and it's faster than the SD card. At least that's my hope.

The Rasp hosting the creaky RFID Access system I hacked together for the local hackerspace (one of the first things hacked in the space) has been running on the same SD Card for I think 8 years now. Issues I've had with SD Cards ended up being due to me using subpar power sources for the Rasp, a mistake I have avoided making since.

I'm surprised there's no onboard storage option yet. I just got the Rasp Zero for a small build with a sensor and I've been super happy with the tiniest computer but I can't imagine they couldn't put storage on the board with a faster connection than the SD-card.

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module[1] has in-built storage. The downside of using the compute module is you need to plug it into a carrier card to breakout all the ports etc.

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[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia...

I've seen success using RAMDisk instead of running entirely on SD card

RAMdisks also help significantly with maximizing the write endurance of the SD card.

Specifically for log files, I use Log2RAM which has a RAMdisk that mounts /var/log, and then periodically (based on schedule, defaulting to daily) flushes it to /var/hdd.log/

Agreed. It's an ugly hack to a problem that should not exist in the first place.

Normal level writes to os disk should not be a OS fatal situational in <year. No matter how you look at this it is not awesome.