Help with SD card choice for OSMC on RPI 3B+

Help and Support
1

I am working on setting up 2 Pi 3B+ osmc clients and a media server using a Pi 4. From the list of sd cards that I have made below what combination do you think would provide the best result? I am thinking that one of the 64gb cards would be good for the “server” as my goal is to store some media on the card, but I am not sure otherwise. I also can’t find clear info, beyond class 10 or better. Thanks in advance!

Pi’s

  • 2x Raspberry Pi 3 B+
  • 1x Raspberry Pi 4 B

Micro SD Cards

  • Samsung 64gb Evo Select SDXC U3
  • Samsung 64gb Evo SDXC U1
  • Sandisk Ultra 32gb SDHC class 10 U1
  • Sandisk Edge 16gb SDHC class 10 U1 A1
2
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3

Thanks What are the specs of the card?

4

I think you will find that any decent quality SD card should work just fine but I would suggest to not use them for media storage. For that I would recommend a self powered spinning rust style drive, preferably in the larger form factor (the ones that contain 3.5" drives).

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5

Regarding SD card performance on a Raspberry Pi there can be found tons of links, this I find impressive.

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6

Thanks! Since the server is designed to be portable(And likely wont require a lot of media storage) I will probably end up using a USB 3.0 drive for the share, but thanks for the tip about not storing media on the card.

7

Thanks for finding that! That helps a lot.

8

Portable server with two clients? The storing media on a SD would be fine if you have a fairly static data set (something like a music library that doesn’t change much) and your card is much larger than what you plan on storing on it. In a nutshell you want to minimize the amount of writes and have plenty of free space to maximize the longevity of the SD. As such shuffling a bunch of video or other files files is best done on a secondary drive. If portablily is more important than lifespan then storing on a thumb drive may be an improvement, but you might want to consider a USB connected SSD as well.

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9

Please note there is an issue with microSD cards greater than 32GB and Raspberry Pi.

On the other hand the best card for a Raspberry Pi after searching the Webb and looking at many tests is

Samsung Evo Plus MicroSDHC Class 10 32 GB

I have a couple of Pi:s and the microSD card that crashed was the one running OSMC. The other Pi:s was just running simple services like dns and such.

I attach a USB-stick to my Pi:s for logs and other stuff to lower the read/writes on the microSD card.

I think that moving the home directory to an USB-drive would keep the load of the microSD card.

Cheers!

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10

What issue would that be? Perhaps your thinking about the issue with RPi’s not being able to boot from an exFAT partition? OSMC makes a small FAT boot partition and the remainder of the drive gets formatted into ext so this should not be an issue.

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11

Thanks for pointing that out. That’s new to me. I just meant in general … but OSMC solves that issue out of the box. Great to know. More kudos to OSMC-team.

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