SD Card Recommendation (OSMC)

I’ve been using a SanDisk 8GB class4 microSD in a raspberry pi v3 for about 2+ yrs now. It has only OSMC on it, media is stored on the network. No issues at all.

Have a more expensive SanDisk 32G class10 microSD in a raspberry pi v2 elsewhere in the house. Before that, it had the 8GB class4 microSD that was moved to the rPi-v3.

I’ve seen quality SanDisk/Samsung 32G class10 (or faster) microSD cards in the last 7 days for less than US$6.

If you keep any media on the SD cards, all bets are off, especially if you move media on and off the cards all the time. If that happens, much over 1 yr is all I’d expect. I’ve abused a Corsair USB3 flash storage in a video recording machine where it stopped accepting any writes after about a 1 yr of use - just after the 1 yr warranty finished. There are Fast SDs and there are high endurance SDs which are designed to handle many more write cycles. Instead, I’d just get an external SSD or powered USB3 HDD enclosure for media.

All my media is on network or I use streaming services.
No media is kept on my problematic cards.

I didnt know high endurance is a thing until now, but understood that read/write limits are a thing.

Unless streaming services are constantly writing/reading from SD I dont see how they’re failing so prematurely. Unless, as sam has pointed out, it’s just a controller fault with ‘run of the mill’ cards and osmc.

Flash chips vary in the amount of times any given sector can be written to. This is true whether your talking about SD cards, thumb drives, eMMC, SSD’s, or anything else using this general type of storage. With SD cards this is not normally published afaik but I think generally speaking the relative price you pay is more often than not indicative of what you should expect. Higher cost cards generally have higher quality flash storage in them.

As far as the amount of writes this may be a bit less obvious than one might think. Leaving debug logging enabled or having some add-on that spams your log can significantly increase your writes. Using file mode instead of the library as well as some add-ons can greatly increase writes because Kodi caches the thumbnails and then regenerates them again if 24hrs has passed and they are accessed again. Whats more as SD cards don’t have smart controllers and wear leveling they don’t have as much endurance as what a spec sheet might imply. If your card is half full of static data then it uses up all the writes available on the other half and then quits even though the first half still has most of its life left.

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You can make a backup of your card using an imaging tool to speed up the restoration process, rather than having to rebuild your system every time. The only catch I’ve found is that SD card capacities vary slightly and so you may need to shrink the backup image partition in order to get it to fit (there are a number of scripts around to do this; my attempt at it is here).

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I had similar issues a year or two back and I moved my osmc to NFS using the standard installer. It’s slightly slower to boot, but has proved to be very reliable. It also means you can see the files from the server pretty easily - in my case FREENAS

Now that is an interesting thought…

hello, such a card is enough MicroSDHC карта SanDisk Ultra SDSQUNS-016G-GN3MN 16 Гб UHS-I Class 1 (U1), Class 10. And most importantly, turn off the menu or the button on the remote control off. Do not try to unplug the power outlet.

Thx ivan.

I never pull the power unless the whole lot has frozen and I cant get in via UI or SSH.

I’ve killed a few cards instantly that way in the past.

Or if you do a file-by-file backup, this problem doesn’t arise.

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You can even go further and run a Pi completely w/o local storage (NFS + PXE). I failed at trying it years ago, but I guess there has been much development since.
I definitely want to give it another try. I did not have the time yet :-/

The OSMC installer suppports NFS but doesn’t, to my knowledge support PXE. I tend to prefer supported solutions, but I guess PXE could also be used if you wanted to DIY. Maybe let us all know how you get on.

I almost always pull the power on my r-pi devices, but not when they are busy doing anything. In general, they are left on, 24/7/365. Hard to tell a device on a different floor to play music if it isn’t already on.

I’ve been using NFS and a DLNA server for all media for a long time. Kodi is just a playback device here.