Is a USB Pendrive much more safer than an SSD card? Will it burn out if I have sensors writing data every 20sec?
SD cards and USB drives of similar quality will have similar write endurances.
The best solution is to buy a cheap 32 or 64gb SATA SSD and a USB to SATA adapter.
SSDs are much more robust (and faster) than flash drives.
1 Like
This is why a MUCH bigger card than is necessary, is recommended for HA so that wear evening can use the whole card and thus last a lot longer.
What helps even more is turning off history/recording and only allowing it for stuff you absolutely NEED
Or just move to a NUC or other PC platform
unfortuntalety I dont have much space for an SSD. my setup is all wallmounted and I ran out of space now 
currently I am using like 10% of my SSD card (32GB) and I was thinking to go for a 64GB USB drive. I record only stuff that I need (I use the include option in the config).
That’s ALL good.
Without the other upgrade options (I run as you do on a Pi with a 32gb card) is take ‘significant’ snapshot backups.
I have a recent image of my sd card (from last platform/hardware addition), so in the event of a failure, 15 mins to write the card, 2 mins to restore the snapshot, I’m good to go in 20 mins.
If you are paranoid (I kinda am) take snapshots after any change. I also have a spare Pi3 and an sd card
You’re as bullet proof as you can be, it should be a long time before anything goes wrong, good luck
thanks … I take snaps daily I am not worried about a failure while I am home, but I would like to avoid failures while I am away or abroad. that is my main concern. if an SSD will fail after lets say 2yrs thats fine for me, but if a USB will fail once every 3yrs that would be even better
No, you’re not gonna get that sort of definition.
It used to be that USB’s with metal casings, dissipate the heat better, lasted 5-10% longer
But as Tom says they are pretty much of a muchness now.
Having said that Higher Quality cards always ‘seem’ to last a LOT longer.
I say ‘seem’ because unless you have two identical systems running the same read/write cycles it’s very subjective.
There are cards advertised that claim enhanced stability but I’ve not (or been able) to run any tests.
1 Like
will try to find a solution with SSD then.
thanks all for your feedback
I was using a Kingston Industrial grade Micro SD.
And it still got to the point where it was getting corrupted reboot sometimes or power loss.
I have recorder only setup for a few devices.
A quality flash drive should be far more reliable than an SD. But as above heat is important for them. I had a Sandisk 64gb USB 3 drive that was very small (one of those micro ones that barely sticks out). It used to get very hot even just plugged in doing nothing and very quickly died even with light use.
I’d get a decent sized one with a metal housing.
Whatever you do, spend the dollar and don’t opt for those cheap Chinese SSD’s.
Your mileage may vary, but my 120GB KingSpec Z3 SSD lasted all of three months running a Docker IOTstack setup. I always kept at least 80% space available for wear leveling,
(Sorry to have bumped this topic, but I thought it necessary to spread the news and inform those who may stumble upon the thread, like me.)