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Anyone ever used a 1TB (or larger) SD card in a Pi or Pi clone? (startrek.website)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by IcedRaktajino@startrek.website to c/raspberry_pi@programming.dev

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Specifically I'm using the OrangePi Zero 2W and the Banana Pi M4 Zero (both are Pi Zero form factor), but I figure if it works in a Raspberry Pi it should work in these. Wondering if they're worth the cost, if they work at all, and/or if it's just asking for trouble.

The project I'm working on requires a good bit of storage. It's essentially an "internet in a box" device that has a portable selection of media (Wikipedia dump, music, TV shows, movies, and books) as well as web-based software to view them (Kiwix, MPD+Snapcast, Jellyfin, Calibre-Web, etc) as well as some other utilities (PiHole for DNS/DHCP/ad blocking, Searx-NG, VPN clients and routing, etc).

The OrangePi is currently the working prototype, and it has a 512 GB SD card and a 512GB USB-connected NVMe. Due to a quirky wifi chip, it requires a separate USB wifi adapter to do hotspot. Because of this, it kind of sprawls and isn't very portable without disassembly.

The Banana Pi has a better wifi chip and can do hotspot internally. So to keep my portable server keychain sized, I'd like to outfit it with either a 1 TB or 1.5 TB SD card for its media store rather than attaching a USB->NVMe enclosure. This one also has eMMC for the system, so it wouldn't be booting from or writing logs, etc to the SD card. Most of the data/media on the SD card would be WORM (write once, read many) but would be updated/refeshed periodically.

Would a large 1 or 1.5 TB SD card (Samsung or Sandisk, depending on price) be a waste of money or be a cause of issues?

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[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

For storing the media should be fine, but I would avoid it for the OS

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

That's what I was thinking but wasn't sure if 1 TB ones would even work (my phone won't read above a 256 GB one, for example).

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

A pi should see an SD card fine, just make sure its exFAT

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Genuinely curious. Why exFAT? (I didn't downvote you, BTW).

I've not had any issues using ext4 for my Pi's SD cards. Any issues due to improper shutdowns are fixed with journal recovery. I also like to set a fairly high commit time in the mount options (120 seconds usually). Worst case is I lose the last 2 minutes of data, but it seems to work well to coalesce the writes (especially for things like Jellyfin or anything that uses SQLite and does a lot of constant little writes).

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 3 points 3 weeks ago

Well yes, if you know what your doing then the best would ext4.

I've not changed commit times before, but I would still avoid heavy write situations

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 1 points 3 weeks ago

I assume the Rpi will be running some Linux, thus exFAT isn't really useful in that scenario.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

According to the official documentation, up to 2 TB SD-cards are supported.

[–] lefaucet@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't have an answer for you

Just wanna say I love your project!

This would be great for parents too

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Thanks. It's basically a travel router + portable app server + media library. I wanted to play with the much more capable Pi Zero clones and it turns out they can run quite a bit of stuff at the same time and the features snowballed as I just kept adding more stuff (I got the models with 4 GB RAM).

This would be great for parents too

Definitely, at least once I add some GPIO switches to set different modes for the networking (that's kind of a pain point now if you need to setup a different wifi client connection, switch its internet connection from wifi to USB tethering from a connect phone or switch the ethernet port from LAN to WAN, etc).

We had a power outage during a snow storm week or so ago and the prototype ran all day from a power bank and kept a limited Jellyfin library online for everyone (mostly Star Trek and Marvel movies since those are the only things everyone in the house can agree on haha).

[–] agilob@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago

Any reason to stick to large SD cards? I have a really good experience running a cluster of rpis on USB nvme disks. I got cheap USB 3 nvme pockets and post-market/post-lease nvme disks. 4 rpis have been running like that for more than 3 years now. They boot in about 1 second, don't have any spikes in energy usage and I don't worry about writing or reading too much from them. Average read/write time is under 2ms.