Best format for SD card to avoid "damage"

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graham-h
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Best format for SD card to avoid "damage"

Post by graham-h »

I'm liking my new Acer Switch 12 but it comes with only 60GB of SSD, making dual-booting a bit of a squeeze. So I've mounted an SD card at /home with the linux system on only 16GB of the SSD and that is working fine, but I'm wondering whether to tweak the format of the card to get round the issues discussed here.

As I understand it, for fast writes and reduced wear, one needs to format partitions so they align with the SD card's erase blocks. You can normally find out the erase block size by looking at /sys/block/mmcblk0/device/preferred_erase_size, but my machine is mounting the card as sdb not mmcblk0 so that raw data is not available.

The advice I've found on this is a few years old and I'm wondering whether it's worth worrying about. Maybe SD card controllers and system drivers have now got smart enough to automatically avoid pages/blocks/block groups which cross erase block boundaries and maybe the fact that linux mounts it as sdb means that it's all taken care of.

Any advice gratefully received.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Pjotr
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Re: Best format for SD card to avoid "damage"

Post by Pjotr »

An SD card is only fit for static "dumb" storage. Only SSD's can handle large amounts of write actions.
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graham-h
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Re: Best format for SD card to avoid "damage"

Post by graham-h »

I hear what you're saying, but my RPi is quite happy as a media centre with the system and data on SD.
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Pjotr
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Re: Best format for SD card to avoid "damage"

Post by Pjotr »

graham-h wrote:I hear what you're saying, but my RPi is quite happy as a media centre with the system and data on SD.
Just don't expect the SD card to live long.... :mrgreen:
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