Question for @geit: SD Cards with OctoPrint

[Ender5r]

Geit, since you've been running OctoPrint on RasPies for so long, I wanted to ask you if you've ever had issues with wearing out the SD cards? Have you seen any reason to install an SSD on an OP RasPi?

I forgot to ask: I assume running a desktop on RasPi OS would lead to a great deal more wear on the SD card. Do you agree?

[Geit]

I just installed the Octoprint image, which has minimal Linux under the hood. The problem is that people just use a very small cheap SD card. My printers all have a 16GB so card. The bigger the card the more spare Blocks a card has.

A full size Linux is also no issue. I run raspbian 24/7 with Pihole for years now, without any issue. I have 6 pi’s running 24/7 since the pi1 was released and I still use the same cards.

The key is a reasonable quality card and at least twice as much space as you need. With 16 or 32GB you have plenty of space for models. I made a backup and reflashed an updated version of Octoprint recently, to update python to V3. The compressed archives with hundreds of models each was about 500MB, which of course did not include the OS.

So in the end those rumors are just false. People use a cheap small card and blame everything, but not their bad decision. Flash Is very reliable these days. Just think about all the phones, tablets and game consoles use flash and would be broken if that failed. It is just crappy first gen china crap that causes issues.

[Ender5r]

Geit, thx for the feedback. I just got a Pi 4 8GB to play with. I'm using a Sandisk 32GB card in it ATM. Setting up for SATA or NVMe SSD still seems like a bit of work, so I'll stick with the SD card for now.

[Geit]

I never used an SSD on any pi. I guess SSDs make most sense PI4 due to its speed, but IMHO this would only be useful when running a desktop system on a pi.

[Ender5r]

Can't disagree. It seems OP really isn't hard on SD cards, so why bother with an SSD?