Saturday, November 8, 2014

Adding a USB Stick to the Raspberry Pi

If you beat the heck out of your SD card on a Raspberry Pi by having code that constantly updates a database, you're eventually going to start having problems with the card.  These little SD cards are tough little critters and (some of them) work really well, but they have a finite life.

I started noticing increased problems with database locks, Occasional corrupted data, the kind of thing that goes along with the SD card starting to fail.  It wasn't a really bad problem, but I don't want to have to deal with a bad problem, so I got one of these:


I picked this particular one after reading about a thousand reviews of various USB sticks and took the plunge for this particular device.  The idea is that I wanted one that wouldn't die in a couple of days, would serve other purposes if I decided to do something else on the Pi, and had enough capacity to be relevant for a long time.  16GB should last me a while on the Pi, and if it became photo storage later, it would handle a lot of them.

I let it set on the shelf for quite a while before I finally decided to use it as the main storage on my Pi.  It's Saturday, I really don't want to dig on the drainage trench I've been working on for two weeks, and the neighbors blocked my driveway with a backhoe, so it's time to do this.

When I went looking on the web for instructions to do this, there were literally thousands of them out there.  Most would work, but I don't want to do most of it on the PC and then stick the device on the Pi and hope.  I was amazed at how many Mac instructions there are; I thought Mac users were all artists that couldn't understand real computers (heh).  But I found a set of simple instructions created by pauly that fit the bill nicely <link>.

Since I'm a coward, I backed up the SD card first, then rebooted the Pi and started down the instructions.  Every single step worked exactly as pauly described, and in about an hour I rebooted using the SD card for the boot partition and the USB card for the main file system.  I didn't do anything about expanding swap space yet, nor did I mess with removing the old file system on the SD card.  Those may become useful at some point, but I don't need to mess with it now.

The Pi booted faster, but that's not very important since I don't boot it very often.  I noticed a slight decrease in load average, and time will tell if I see a decrease in the number of problems I've been having.  It's only been up for a couple of hours so I can't speak from experience yet.

I do need to look at the mount point I used for the usb stick though.  I used the default /dev/sda for it, and if I plug in another USB stick, I may have a problem with the default name.  There's the by-id device to look at and I should use it so the name is constant.  But, for now, I'll just get some experience with the setup and see if it holds together.  That's mostly why I have a backup and also kept the file system on the SD card.

This particular Pi has two XBees on it.  As I mentioned in previous posts, I had to do this because the default Digi network and Lowe's Iris devices don't play well together.  This was the third device I added to the USB buss; so I have a powered hub in place to take care of the fact that my USB buss probably uses more power than the computer that runs it.  I'm currently using one of these:
It has seven ports; I hope I don't need all of them, and came with a power supply that can handle that many devices.  I've been bitten by devices like this that just can't cut it when I plugged in a few power hungry peripherals.  It's really annoying to have to hunt down a power supply when you want to try something.  This little guy has worked well.

So, here's a possibility for you folk that are nearing the failure point of the SD card.  Most people that play with the Pi's don't run them 24x7 for months on end with a database and web server beating on things, so they'll never get to this point.

But, some of us do.

8 comments:

  1. HI.
    A bit off topic, but you should read about SLC USB pens... (and other types) mass consumer grade pens usually will have the same problems of the SD cards, and SLCs are not much more expensive than regular ones...
    take care (and thanks for your blog)

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    1. Well, there's something else I never knew existed. Sigh.

      Thanks for the pointer.

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    2. Dave, for constant data recording you should consider using memcached. That is what I use on my Pi when grabbing second by second data. I write the data to memory using memcached and then every minute - or hour depending - I write it out to mysql. I tend to use just one record in mysql with a delimited string field for the data, since that is how most charting programs like it anyway.

      Tom, NJ

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    3. Tom, that's a really good idea. I'll be looking into it.

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  2. And you can probably run the RPi off of the powered USB hub as well....

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    1. Crap, I didn't think of that. Thanks, I've got to go try that right now.

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    2. When I decide to do something like this, I'll get a hub I can mount the RPi to and go from there. Have you seen the new model A+ and B+ versions of the RPi? I'll stick with my model B for now...

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    3. I may go for a b+ at some point, the additional gpio pins are nice. There's nothing else about it that intrigues me.

      They didn't add wifi.

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