[time-nuts] Re: Clock display on Linux systems?

[Bill Dailey]

You can also set them up so they don’t write to the SD once everything is set.  SD’s will last forever like this.  Basically read only and RAM disk. 

Bill Dailey

Negativity always wins the short game. But positivity wins the long game. - Gary Vaynerchuk

Don’t be easy to understand, 
Be impossible to misunderstand 
- Steve Sims

> On Dec 8, 2021, at 3:27 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts <time-nuts at lists.febo.com> wrote:
> 
> I forget where I saw it, but my understanding is that the big issue is finding SD cards that can perform whole-disk wear leveling, like proper SSDs do. Apparently, the WD purple series do, according to the e-mail thread I read that I forgot where. Someone contacted WD and got a confirmation that these really do have whole-disk wear leveling. Given that they’re targeting surveillance cameras, it seems reasonable.
> 
>>> On Dec 7, 2021, at 6:09 AM, John Sloan <jsloan at diag.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> In this application RPis seem to last for many years - in others where we
>>> use the SD-card (e.g. influxdb or similar) they seem to regularly fail in
>>> 1-2 years, requiring an reformat or new SD-card. An RPi or similar with a
>>> more robust SSD/M2 drive would be good.
>> 
>> I’ve had the same experience with the SD cards.
>> 
>> At least the most recent Raspberry Pis (e.g. the 4B) support firmware to boot from USB with just a little configuration effort. I just recently starting playing with this, booting a RPi 4B from a USB-attached Samsung T5 SSD. It seems to work mostly fine (caveat: see below). For other reasons, I’ve been running a RPi-specific version of Linux MATE, but Raspbian should work okay too. (I tried the RPi-specific image of Ubuntu, since I run Ubuntu on my Intel machines, but was not terribly impressed; slow interactive response.)
>> 
>> One thing I did run into: if I try to plug too many USB devices in along with the SSD - e.g. in my case a mouse, keyboard, and GPS dongle - the system crashes because the SSD USB connection resets. It seems to be a power problem; I solved it with an external powered USB hub, leaving the SSD on a USB port on the RPi.
>> 
>> :John
>> 
>> --
>> J. L. Sloan             Digital Aggregates Corporation
>> +1.303.489.5178         3440 Youngfield Street
>> mailto:jsloan at diag.com  #209
>> http://www.diag.com     Wheat Ridge CO 80033 USA
>> 
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