SSD vs SD
How important is disk speed on a signal K Pi setup? Does it run OK with only a microSD card, or is an SSD necessary?
8 Replies
MicroSD is ideal but you can expand with nvme if you need more storage. Unless you are storing media you’re probably fine without ssd
It much easier to corrupt a microSD card vs a SSD. make sure you have a way to safely shutdown the Pi especially if using a MicroSD - Also, once you are happy with your setup, copy the SD card and have a spare onboard
OK, so I'm going with an SH-Rpi hat to have a power supply with gentle shutdown and a SSD mounted on a NVMe Base (between Pi and touch screen). Probably overkill..
In my experience … started using sdcard .. quickly “expanded” the system.. ie lots of plugins, and partic when using “database” stuff (aka influxDB) … i quickly found the sdcard introduced limitations …
your solution … probably only overkill “initially” … but as your system grows (more devices sensors et al) & you start using a lot of plugins, & doing database stuff with influx, and then graphs with grafana …. and nodered flows … and so on… its addictive! and yoiu will soon appreciate the speed, reliability etc of the SSD
Even with Influx you should not be filling up the SD card. I have an sd card at 7% capacity running all kinds of plugins, influx, grafana, and multiplexing NMEA 2k and 0183. I think an ssd is overkill unless you store media, or are not managing logs and influx data. You should be clearing historical data and monitoring the use of storage over time.
it is not so much the space issue but the continual writing of data to the SD card that causes an issue, SSD's normally have around 10x the number of write cycles to SD cards
Here are the metrics for the same pi 4b with SD storage on Openplotter. Running quite a bit under utilized with a couple of heat sinks for cooling in a waterproof enclosure
my 4 was similar, but when panning and zooming OCPN, it was a little laggy. 5 is better and most of the time, the numbers are even lower.