microSD Cards Revisit

[O635789]

I’m in the market of storage for my new Rock Pi 4A which I’m going to use as the dedicated smart home controller. So the speed is not important but the endurance is, I could even remove the GUI completely since I’ll run it headless anyway.

In my mind microSD or any memory card is not made to last, so I ordered the M.2 extension board and planning to use SSD as the root file system just for that reason. Actually, I just learned using non high endurance microSD cards in Pi-like devices will void the warranty, according to SanDisk customer service.

I was totally surprised when doing a little homework on high endurance microSDs. I picked the products from 3 well established brands: Samsung, SanDisk and Kingston, here are the numbers (Samsung 970 Evo Plus is listed as reference):

I even thought it might be typos on Samsung part, but apparently it’s not, the warranty says it all. For the 128GB version, 43,800 hours of “full HD video recording” time make exactly 5 years.

Screenshot: warranty periods from Samsung’s website

Here are the image of the products in the comparison:

[setq]

great job! (characters patch)

[lymkin]

I would use the eMMC chip for /boot if your going to use the NVMe as /root. I don’t think you will have endurance issues with the eMMC. I posted a guide on how to do what you are going to do if you are planning on using Home Assistant.

Lymkin/RockP_4_Home_Assistant_Build

[O635789]

I wish there are TBW numbers for the eMMCs allnet is selling, theoretically the endurance of eMMC is somewhere between the regular microSD and TLC SSDs, but these high endurance microSDs redefined the concept. I received the 128GB Samsung card will run performance tests and post back. On RockPi4 microSD is limited to 50MB/s, the cards are rated at 30MB/s, it’s going to be interesting.

I’ve been running HA in Python virtualenv on Debian ARM64, I posted my experience some time ago:

Running Home Assistant on Rock Pi 4

I chose with Home Assistant for my smart home project after tried other solutions. I’m using a ZWave.Me RaZberry HAT on Rock Pi 4, and a pair of Enerwave Smart Switch with Energy Monitor as starter. Probably you know Rock Pi 4 doesn’t work out-of-box with HATs talk on RX/TX, actually neither Raspberry Pi 3. They have different problem but all have the same symptoms, RX/TX are occupied by other functions, on Raspberry Pi 3 it’s the Bluetooth, on Rock Pi 4 it’s the FIQ debugger. [IMG_20190212_1…

[O635789]

You are fine, the software on RockPi4 needs a lot of improvements indeed, I’ve been struggling too, but hope getting there soon.

[O635789]

I pin high hope on Debian Buster (the next major release of Debian), when I tried some packages from Buster, seems it could use the hardware natively without any rockchip mods. We’ll see when it comes out

[jack]

This is not specified in the datasheet of the report of the eMMC chip from Foresee. But usually the official statement is 800 to 1000 times full chip erasing/writing. From this, the life time is higher than the sd card.