Raspi: is microSD lifetime a problem? solutions?

Hello all,

i, as probably some of you, operate a raspi with raspian and yunohost as a mailserver, and it works very well since a couple of months now. I very much fancy the <500mAh (2,5Watts) of the raspi in contrast to <10W of, e.g. an Intel NUC, switching to a “professional” HW would be painful to that respect.

So i rely on the raspi hw (which i see not much of a problem, as it can be easily and quickly replaced) and the lifetime of a micro sd card. Now for the latter: sd cards are not meant to be operated 24/7 and especially they do not provide health information via S.M.A.R.T. or similar.

How do you cope with that?

i see the following possibilities:

  • have daily backup of config& data, wait till it dies and rebuild using backups (basically: don’t care, SD cards are good enough)
  • rebuild with a new micro sd card every six months proactively
  • mitigate sd card wear, e.g. with USB SSD for data and log files (/var/log, /var/mail, /home etc)
  • switch to banana pi r1 or similar, with SATA port and use SSD. still boots from sd card though

your thoughts on that?

  • pangu