SD Card doesn't fit in Home Assistant Green slot

[marcsetgo (Marc)]

I bought a Samsung Pro Endurance 128Gb SD card and it torques to the side when trying to insert it into the Green’s slot. Thinking it might be a misalignment between the case and the actual hardware slot, I removed the case - no change. Thinking maybe the larger memory size SD cards are slightly wider to prevent insertion into devices that don’t support the size (even though I can’t find anything on the web about this), I also tried a 32Gb card.

Many answers to this on the web talk about not being able to seat it fully to get it to click in place and latch. That’s not this problem. The wing on the right side of the card is too wide to fit into the slot.

Any thoughts?

[tmjpugh]

Slot damaged or you’re doing it wrong.

[jackjourneyman (Jack)]

Upside down?

[orange-assistant]

@marcsetgo

Samsung Pro Endurance 128Gb

That sounds to be the wrong card for typical HA tasks anyway.

CCTV, dash cams, and body cams.

Continuously writing big chunks of video files is kind of the opposite what ha/applications/OS do which is high random I/o (read & write), hence the ha documentation does specifically mention SD cards with application class (a1/a2) and not some marketing labeled “endurance” card without any A-rating

@marcsetgo

tried a 32Gb card.

With application class? Not that the wrong ones won’t fit…

@orange-assistant

don’t unterstand that people fail for this marketing BS despite the HA docs tell you what type of SD card is best for the task (the opposite of a “Max endurance” card, one that has high random IO and isn’t optimized for sequential writes)

@orange-assistant

The best, when using SD cards, is (like the ha docs tell us) to use A1/A2 type cards.

Micro SD Card.

• Ideally get one that is Application Class 2. Check for the label A2 on the card. Application Class 2 cards perform better especially on small read and write operations and are better suited to host applications.
• Make sure to use a card that provides at least 32 GB.

@orange-assistant

@ogiewon

I have recorded continuously to SD cards like yours in cameras, as those cards have lasted well over a year. The Samsung High Endurance cards have never failed in multiple years of use.

Completely different use case and you misinterpreted your mileage to be valid for a complete different task (which is it not!)

If you use such cards for continuous recording like the seller expects (“Full HD (1920x1080) video content recorded at 26 Mbps”) the write amplification factor will be probably always be 1.

So for every (m)byte requested from the OS to be written to storage also exactly one (m)byte is actually written to flash. That’s great because no waste of valuable flash cells.

But wait, now we don’t write 26Mbps contentiously (and the limited warranty might is void) but instead we let HA do it’s job which consists of writing a very small amount of data but that quite regularly.

As an example if HA(OS) wants to write only 1 byte it will cause huge write amplification because it’s not possible for the flash storage to only write that 1 byte. Instead a whole page worth of (e.g) 16kbyte gets written/wasted/worn for that tiny little byte.

Now we can do the easy calculation and we find out that the write amplification factor would be 16.000 (yes, sixteen thousand) in this case.

So while @ogiewon got good mileage using this cards for the proper task with a WAF=1 they are NOT RECOMMENDED for the use with HA or any other DB application and should be avoided

The correct sd cards one wants to use are listed in the docs and what only matters is that they have the A2 class (beside probably using a product from a flash manufacture too).

[marcsetgo (Marc)]

After removing it from the case I can clearly see that the width of the slot housing is not wide enough for either of the cards I’ve tried. Turn the cord over has no effect on its width unfortunately

I’ve posted a ticket with nabucasa. At this point I suspect a defect in the slot, but who knows.

[ShadowFist]

@marcsetgo

After removing it from the case I can clearly see that the width of the slot housing is not wide enough for either of the cards I’ve tried. Turn the cord over has no effect on its width unfortunately

First things first - the SDCard is only used for recovery, as explained in the HA Green Docs

@marcsetgo

The wing on the right side of the card is too wide to fit into the slot

Secondly, have a look at this (grainy) gif. The Green accepts an SDCard upside down, so the wing should be the left of the card.