Bought a pi4 when they where first available, I'm guessing at least 4 years probably more. It runs, or ran 24/7 flawlessly till about 3 months ago when things went wonky. After troubleshooting off and on i finally came to the conclusion the pi was going intermittent. Replaced it and things all good but I'm curious if that is about all I'm going to get out of them. I have several more i use for development and they run far less than that one but for a fairly completely solid state device I would think it would last longer. Any one willing to share what kind of life they are getting?
The only Pies that have gone bad for me were ones that I did not put in a case. Some tiny surface mount components are very easily damaged or knocked off.
And reportedly, a bad voltage at a GPIO pin can cause damage that propagates through the integrated circuit, eventually killing it. Don't know if that's a timescale of months or milliseconds though.
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All my Pi are still going apart from the ones where I've shorted out pins or otherwise damaged them.
I did sell off all my old original A/B/B+ ones a couple of years ago but I've several PiZeros and and old A+ that run 24/7 around the house.
Only thing that goes wrong with them is that the SD card's sometimes need replacing when worn out
The other thing that could go wrong is the power supply rather than the Pi itself. Always worth trying an alternate before condemning the Pi. The SD-cards also don't last forever of course. The early Pi's in particular were very sensitive to power supply issues.
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I sort of agree with @TotallyInformation
Power supplies can be problematic.
I had a very early Pi and it lasted years.
The only reason it got replaced was lack of memory.
(Not wanting to make your life miserable - seriously.)
Get suspect Pi and stick a new SD card in it, new PSU (yeah, I know it isn't a good idea to change 2 things at once) get it running and just see what happens over a few days.
If all ok, make a choice to either put the original PSU back or put the original SD card back in.
This time one at a time.
Then see what happens.
Good luck.
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As far as I can remember I have only ever had one pi fail. Several PSUs and SD cards, yes. But the only pi was one that ran continuously in a polytunnel, getting cooked in the summer and frozen in the winter, and ran for 7 years (or thereabouts) before it did eventually fail.
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Get good SD cards, last time I did, I went over to pibenchmarks and ended up with sandisk ultra sdcard. But that's what has failed for me.
My NAS is a Pi4B and it's worked flawlessly for the last 4/5 years (knock wood). I've got a number of PIs and none of them ever had bigger issues. I do add heatsinks to them to avoid over heating.
I also use Raspberry power supplies, i.e. raspberry hardware for raspberries.
Yes, but that isn't to say they can't fail.
What guarantees are there that tomorrow the sun will rise?
Of course not, but 120k tests of sdcards say that sdcard XYZ is the one with the least failures then you might be able to reduce the chance of failure.
After all, the universe tends to more entropy not less, so we're all doomed to become atoms.
We have a lifetime warranty on that one.
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None.
I am trying to be as brief as I can. I just remember I HAVE been down this road myself.
I lost about 2 months of problems with some (more than one) Pies.... They weren't rebooting, but weird things were happening and I couldn't believe understand what was happening.
It was with great reluctance I changed PSU and all the problems went away.
I'm just saying.
Try not take anything for granted.
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Sorry I was off-point.
Definitely take nothing granted especially with technology where so many moving parts come together in a finely balanced mess. Multiple single points of failure.
To elaborate more.
Power supplies, sd cards, cables, 100% positive it's the pi.
I think i got my monies worth out of it, slightly disappointed is all.
I agree with you, my worst experience was an intermitant problem on power supply. Over the year I used about 10 PI none of them ever fail.
I've used many Pi's over the years since the original - which still works but is now retired. Only one has ever failed and that was a Pi3 powered via POE hat; it was killed by an PAT tester applied to the POE injector.
I have a PI4 in the office that runs various applications under docker (headless). It had become unstable and would reboot once ot twice a day. I ran journalctl -f in a terminal which revealed "undervoltage detected". I replaced the power supply (yes a PI one!) and it's been stable ever since.
I have several pi's that run 24/7 and they are mostly runing off SSD rather than SD cards but I ahve found the Samsung PRO Endurance SD cards to be more reliable than Sandisk - maybe I got fake Sandisk cards?
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Apparently their quality did degrade and the ones I was using were from a previous batch that was good - so yes, sandisk do vary but my experience (not having purchased from the bad batch) has been overall positive.
I'm also using SSDs from Sandisk and their also still doing ok - again, it was a good batch!
I use Samsung EVO/EVO Pro cards wherever possible. I know they have wear levelling internally which is the key to longevity on SD-Cards.
Obviously though, for wear levelling to be effective, you need to have a card that is significantly larger than your general needs. I've always found the 32GB cards to be ideal.
I'm about to resurrect one of my Pi's (a Pi 3b I think) to install in a house that I need to remotely monitor and control. I have an internal camera there that - like so many - tends to take itself offline and not come back. I'm prepping some remote Wi-Fi switches as well. Partly to have better security lighting but also to be able to reboot the camera remotely.
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I'm finding this thread quite fascinating. I've wondered occasionally if anyone else hits the same quirks I have. With @TotallyInformation last entry I've had the same problem for years and do the exact same thing to get my camera's back, remote relay to reboot. On another note I mainly use 64g cards after finding a great deal once and bought 3 lifetimes quantities, I hope my kids can sell them when I go.
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I was always afraid of the fact, that my SD card will eventually stop working one day.
So, instead of buying a new, big, long-lasting SD card for more money every 2 years, I've decided to:
- Buy 1 USB-SATA converter. (It's an Axagon Fastport 2) = ca. $12 USD
- And took an old, used 128GB SSD lying around.
- No external power source is attached to the USB converter.
- The SD card is left inside, as secondary / failsafe boot.
(You can set the boot text file to do that!)
The SSD is an ADATA SU800, which I've picked that time for reliability, and most of them working ever since (7+ years!) in pizzerias. Only 2 died from 50+ after 6 years.
First, I've tried an other (used) SSD, I think it was Samsung, and the Pi was unstable with it. Took too much power.
Results:
- The Pi boots 5x faster.
- Everything is fast. I'm using the full GUI of the PiOS. Even developed on it with VSC + VNC.
- 128GB is a lot, so still using only 40% of the disk after working on it continuously.
- Running docker containers on it too. (+NR of course)
- Wear level is still OK, because I have RPi4 + 4GB ram. So rarely using any swap.
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(Ok, I don't want to take this thread off topic too much.)
(I would have to go back through log files to find PROOF of it, but...)
I once had a Pi (2b+ I think) running for 52 weeks non-stop.
Alas a power failure kinda killed it growing any more.
(did a quick look and couldn't find it.)
But I was so happy seeing the uptime counter get to that kind of number!
