Raspberry PI - SD Card Corruption

Posted by: trickydickie on 25 February 2015

I've been using a Raspberry PI for some time now to run Asset and it has been excellent and generally very reliable.  It runs for months without needing any attention.

 

A couple of times I have accidentally removed the power when the PI wasn't correctly shutdown which corrupted the SD card.

 

On the weekend, during a listening session the music stopped after the first track of an album.  After checking the cause it appeared that I couldn't access the Pi, i.e I couldn't open a terminal session to the device.

 

I rebooted with a monitor attached and the file system was corrupt.  

 

The installation is pretty simple, just Raspian and Asset with little overclocking.  I am sing a genuine Kingston MicroSD card, type 4.

 

Has anyone experience any issues like this?  I'm wondering if I should try a different card.

 

Thanks

 

Richard

Posted on: 25 February 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Hi Richard - rock solid here - and has been for a couple of years now - however I don't over clock - which unless you are heatsinking the CPU and possibly other components I definitely wouldn't encourage.

But a hard power down - and more so power up is always going to most strain on components.. and if slightly stressed with overclocking I guess you have to expect a shortened life.

Simon

 

Posted on: 25 February 2015 by GregW

Like Simon I don't overclock and I haven't had any issues with my 2 units. I just checked and the Model A in the server rack has an uptime of 718 days! The B+ I have is more of a utility device so it's often unplugged, but always shutdown first. 

 

I'm not all plugged into the Pi community, but everything I have ever read indicates they are prone to SD card corruption, especially when the power is pulled. 

 

If you need more power the newly announced Pi 2 model might be just the ticket.

Posted on: 25 February 2015 by trickydickie

Thanks, I only had the overclock on a lowish setting but have disabled, I'll see how it goes.

 

I may have been unlucky this time as otherwise it has been rock solid apart from when I have pulled the power accidentally.  It is on a UPS with the NAS so power outages are a rare thing.

 

I've noticed that there can be instances of corruption, some people seem to just boot off the SD card and then use a hard drive for the root partition.  I was wondering if creating an ISCSI disk on my NAS drive could be a good idea.

 

The new model looks interesting, I think a new version of Asset will be required to make best use of the new multicore processor, but will probably be worthwhile at some point.

 

Richard

Posted on: 25 February 2015 by simes_pep

Hi,

Had my Pi over clocked for over a year with no problem. But I did have heat sinks on the board, but heat was never an issue. I would pull the power, particularly if I needed to reboot the mounted NAS, as I am still running Asset 4.2, and it has an issue when the watched folder is unavailable.

 

Yes, SD cards as the main storage is not ideal, but effectively just a small SSD, but any storage device can fail.

 

I have a RPI 2 now, seeing some performance improvement for Asset, but some optimization is needed for the multi-core architecture and also the ARM7 ISA, with a recompilation before real improvements can be gained. However overall much more responsive.

Have it over clocked too, but not forced, so on idle it is normal clock rates & voltages, so just a boost when scanning or rescanning. Transcoding Flac to WAV even 24/192 files doesn't trigger the CPU load to boost.

 

SP

Posted on: 26 February 2015 by DavidDever

The overclock will affect IIRC the SDIO bus frequency, which may be part of the problem.