boot off of SD or internal storage?

[second exodous]

I have never used the internal storage on my Pandora, always opting to boot off of an SD card thinking if I use the internal storage it will wear out. Anyone else have this concern? Is there a huge speed advantage to using the internal storage? My Pandora runs fine on a SD card so I assume the Pyra will also. I'm thinking about getting a 256GB pro Samsung card, I have a 128GB in my action cam and I get 88 MB/s read off of it so they're pretty fast as far as sd cards go.

Who will use the 32GB of internal storage to run the OS on and who will just boot off of an SD?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

I always use the SD, and keep the NAND for "emergency cases" like a .pnd not running on Slackware.
I guess I'll do the same on Pyra.

 

[TrashyMG]

Performance wise the eMMC has double the speed. I'll use it until it breaks. I see no point to not use it.
[doublepost=1474022505,1474021348][/doublepost]Oh and just to add, unlike the Pandora on the Pyra the internal storage is actually somewhat user replaceable as it resides on the CPU board.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Performance wise the eMMC has double the speed. I'll use it until it breaks. I see no point to not use it.
[doublepost=1474022505,1474021348][/doublepost]Oh and just to add, unlike the Pandora on the Pyra the internal storage is actually somewhat user replaceable as it resides on the CPU board.

If the eMMC breaks, can a MicroSD card be used? Or will it not boot?

 

[TrashyMG]

If the eMMC breaks, can a MicroSD card be used? Or will it not boot?

It can boot from any SD slot, there is nothing on the eMMC needed for booting.

 

[Grench]

I have never used the internal storage on my Pandora, always opting to boot off of an SD card thinking if I use the internal storage it will wear out. Anyone else have this concern? Is there a huge speed advantage to using the internal storage? My Pandora runs fine on a SD card so I assume the Pyra will also. I'm thinking about getting a 256GB pro Samsung card, I have a 128GB in my action cam and I get 88 MB/s read off of it so they're pretty fast as far as sd cards go.

Who will use the 32GB of internal storage to run the OS on and who will just boot off of an SD?

I have never seen a case of someone who actually wore out the Pandora's internal storage. Conceptually it could, but it would take a lot.

But this practice brings a question. If you are not going to take advantage of it, then who are you saving it for? Some unknown future owner if you sell it used? You paid for the feature. Use it.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

It can boot from any SD slot, there is nothing on the eMMC needed for booting.

Wait, can the Pandora do that too? I was always under the impression that if the NAND broke, then the Pandora was bricked. I assumed it would be the same for the Pyra.

 

[second exodous]

I have never seen a case of someone who actually wore out the Pandora's internal storage. Conceptually it could, but it would take a lot.

But this practice brings a question. If you are not going to take advantage of it, then who are you saving it for? Some unknown future owner if you sell it used? You paid for the feature. Use it.

The main reason I just wanted more space. I guess I can use the Pyra nand for root and the internal sd slot for /home, that way it boots quickly and still have tons of room for files without taking an external sd slot.

 

[TrashyMG]

The main reason I just wanted more space. I guess I can use the Pyra nand for root and the internal sd slot for /home, that way it boots quickly and still have tons of room for files without taking an external sd slot.

Assuming Nikolaus got the SDIO bus muxing working properly.

 

[Grench]

Wait, can the Pandora do that too? I was always under the impression that if the NAND broke, then the Pandora was bricked. I assumed it would be the same for the Pyra.

In my experience, the Pandora can boot from all ports/slots and was designed to be essentially unbrickable.

One exception. Don't make my mistake and feed it 12vdc. That can brick it.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Ouch, sorry to hear that.

 

[levi]

That's technically a fry, not a brick

I used to run my Pandora off SD, partly because I didn't want churn on my NAND flash (both from OS updates, and from buggy software writing to my home directory), and partly because I thought I was going to opkg install loads of things, but in practice never did. In practice, for the number of updates, and the number of home directory writing bugs means the former reason never really came true, and as I mentioned I never ended up using the extra space.

The Pyra won't have a lack of space on its eMMC flash, but it will likely have more churn from OS updates on Debian than it had from Angstrom+notaz's work. Still, on my netbook I ran Ubuntu on it's internal flash for about 18 months at a guess, and lately Arch for over a year, and both of those are far, far more busy OSes than Debian stable (assuming that's what we'll end up with), and I'm even writing persistent logs on those OSes (although on my Arch install my /var mount is on another SSD, can't remember my Ubuntu install that well). And that's a cheap Chinese netbook, not a carefully crafted German gem - I strongly doubt running my OS from the internal NAND will cause the part to fail.

I did lose one SSD controller on my netbook, fwiw, but that was a secondary controller that held my home directory, and had two different SSDs plugged into it over the years. Pff, cheap Chinese rubbish!

 

[WizardStan]

It can boot from any SD slot

I seem to recall that booting is limited to the eMMC channel (on which the internal uSD is also attached, so bootable), and one of the other 3 SD channels, so only one of the external SD cards will be bootable, just like on the Pandora.

In my experience, the Pandora can boot from all ports/slots

although I could be misremembering. I'm too lazy to make a bootable SD card to verify, but one of us is mistaken as to whether the right slot can boot or not

 

[TrashyMG]

I seem to recall that booting is limited to the eMMC channel (on which the internal uSD is also attached, so bootable), and one of the other 3 SD channels, so only one of the external SD cards will be bootable, just like on the Pandora.

Where did you read this?

 

[Silent-Hunter]

If I remember correctly, the right slot couldn't boot for a long time, but then notaz fixed it.

 

[TrashyMG]

although I could be misremembering. I'm too lazy to make a bootable SD card to verify, but one of us is mistaken as to whether the right slot can boot or not

It can boot off both slots now as of a recent 1.75 patch. Full-reflash required though, won't update the bootloader with a network update.

 

[WizardStan]

Ah, that makes sense. I'm not crazy, just old

 

[netcat]

I have a basic question:

If / when eMMC or sd starts dying, does the filesystem detect it immediately and simply avoid the bad blocks?

Or do we get corrupt data?

 

[Letalis Sonus]

and simply avoid the bad blocks?

It can't avoid what has no fixed physical mapping. The FTL does the whole wear leveling and therefore decides on the fly which memory areas will be used when a block is being written.

 

[netcat]

decides on the fly

f. smart