Raspberry Pi4 with ubuntu??

Dana Thu, 17 Oct 2019 15:31:05 +0100, RobH napis'o:

Using USB HDD instead of SD card to store data.

Cant see why not. I have been running CCTV on many pi zeros using 64GB SD cards for years. So I can't see a Pi4 having any problems.

Oh but I'm running Raspbian Lite. That might make a difference.

Thanks, that's great, and I'll do that.

I find I get even better results with the Devuan ASCII2 image - and a lot better low-level control.

By default this doesn't install any users or graphics, just CLI root.

The SD card wont last long handling continuous video. A USB3 to SATA adaptor and a small SSD is the way to go.

The only issue with Ubuntu rather than Raspbian is its video acceleration is not as mature (or wasn't last time I looked). It will depend on the software you intend to use whether it could take advantage of video encoders in the GPU.

---druck

They do sell SD cards which are supposably rated for continuous video recording. I'm in no position to say whether or not that's just marketing though.

Unless you're looking to mimimise power consumption to minimise operating costs, or running from a UPS.

I have a Class 10 Sandisk microsd card rated for video, and have the same in a indoor camera which has lasted for about 6 months upto now.

I originaly used an ssd in a desktop with the cctv software , but it stopped working after a few months. From what I have read, both usb and ssd drives are not recommended for video recording. A spining disk, yes.

I have heard this before. How long is "wont last long"? My 64Gb micro SD cards were bought from Lidl in 2013 and have been running 24/7* ever since. That's 6 years+ and still going strong. :-)

However, other SD cards from some Ebay sellers have lasted less than 24 hours. :-(

• not counting down time for maintenance, updates, etc.

On Thu, 17 Oct 2019 23:03:45 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) declaimed the following:

Class-10 card speed is rated for streaming video to a freshly formatted card. However, that is based on a single active file in use, and FAT (non-journaling) file system. Current R-Pi uses EXT3 or EXT4 journaling file system with lots of small files getting in the way of streaming.

You probably want that hard-drive even more if you don't have a UPS... Having a hard power-drop on a Linux file system can corrupt it -- putting the active data on a hard-drive rather than the same SD card the OS is running from may make recovery easier (it takes some tricks to fsck the running partition(s), but with all variable data on a hard-drive you can boot with hard-drive dismounted, fsck it, then mount it for use).

I've been *very* lucky. My Pi runs Rasbian Stretch with the default ext4 filesystem on the SD card. I've had a *lot* of power cuts over the past few months, either due to high-voltage faults on the feed to the village, or the RCD tripping during recent building work. And every time the Pi has booted up normally and quickly (*). Mind you, my Windows 7 PC (NTFS) has been subjected to the same power cuts and it too has recovered perfectly - only a couple of times has it needed to chkdsk the system drive.

In fact the only time I ever had the system drive go bad, preventing the Pi from booting, was after a tidy "reboot" which should have shut things down gracefully. I now take an image of the SD card every month or so, which will let me hit the ground running (although with out-of-date data) more quickly than having to reinstall Raspbian and customise the Pi the way I want it. And I back up user data every couple of days - weather-station readings and PVR scheduled TV recordings: I moved those always-on tasks from Windows to Pi the other year so my Windows PC doesn't have to stay on 24/7.

(*) I don't have a screen connected to the Pi, and my only access is by PuTTY or VNC remote desktop, so I don't see the boot-up messages, but the Pi is back so quickly that it doesn't have time to fsck the disk, so evidently it's never needed to.

I can imagine various solutions to those problems, and I haven't found ext3/4 to be as fragile as you're making out. But in any case it is easy to have a FAT file-system on a separate partition to the one that the OS is installed on, and use that for the video recordings. If it is actually the FAT-formatted first partition which the Pi boots from, resized to be much larger than standard, then you also get the advantage of the data being readable from Windows or Mac, which I believe only support reading from the first partition of an SD card.

Back in te day when I ran a business with 70+ PCS and half a dozen UNIX servers, I only once had a machine fail to boot after a power cut.

a VERY heavily lioaded SCO unix machine right in te power supply limits.

We had the servers set to autoboot after power was restored. What happened was that power went out, then a few seconds later, it was restored but 'browned out' a few seconds after that. All the PCS managed to have enough stored in their main capacitors to survive. Not the SCO,. That went down in the middle of I suspect fsck....

It never booted off that drive again. Fortunately most of te data was on another three drives, but some of the data on the system drive was irreplaceable, and never got replaced either.

Ther is a lesson here and that is that whilst EXT2 and friends are massively robust, they are not indestructible, and machines that boot automatically like a pi are vulnerable.

My advice if its mission critical, is to have as vanilla and replaceable a boot device, as possible. Data disks that seldom get written to are far far less likely to suffer power related irrevocable failures.

In my own pi the SD card contains no moving data of any importance. Only logs IIRC.

Everything else is network mounted. And the network server is a linux PCX86 with NO AUTOBOOT ON POWER!!!

Or you could use a SATA USB drive.

I learnt my lessons. When the power flickers and dies and then comes back on, I make a cup of coffee and a snack and wait for 45 minutes before I reboot.

BTDTYGTTS

Running the system entirely from RAM is another solution. Tiny Core Linux does this, and has a Raspberry Pi build. I'm not sure if anyone's got it working with the Pi4 yet though.

You still need to boot it off SD

I guess you could make /var/log a ram disk :-)

But the partition with the OS can be mounted read-only (or not at all once everything has been loaded to RAM), so a power failure shouldn't corrupt any data required to boot.