[fpc-other] Anyone using Orange PI

[Travis Siegel]

I don't know anything about your intended use/design, but network storage 
is always an option.  I quite successfully connect to other computers on 
my pi to store extra materials if I need additional backups, including 
copies of the sd card image for booting the pi, and although the access 
isn't exactly lightning fast, it's plenty fast enough for most purposes. 
Assuming the pis aren't going to be out in the field or something, there's 
nothing preventing you from using a file system mounted on the pi that 
physically exists on another system elsewhere on the network, but if it 
comes to that, there's plenty of thumb drives, external hds, and various 
other devices that plug in via usb that will work just as well.  I had 
multiple external hds plugged into my pi via the usb ports, and there was 
no issues whatsoever with them.  I had an 80GB IDE drive in an external 
case plugged in via usb, and I had another drive that was a 500GB SATA 
drive in an external case also connected to the pi via usb, and 
transferring files from pi to drive or indeed from disk a to disk b worked 
perfectly well.  It took time due to the limitations of usb transfer 
rates, but it worked with no trouble.  mounting network shares works too. 
I used to transfer files to my wife's windows machine this way.


On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:

> On 01/03/17 12:30, Andreas Berger wrote:
>> In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:
>>>> I agree. Most of our RPis are actually running Debian, but in extremis
>>>> it's always possible to roll back to Raspbian as a baseline
>>>> configuration.
>>>> 
>>>> There are of course other small boards: Olimex, Odroid and now Asus.
>>>> However RPi does offer a fairly flexible and cost-effective range, and
>>>> unless the OP is considering shipping hundreds rather than 10s of boards
>>>> I suggest that getting onto both the Linux learning curve and one for
>>>> minority hardware is quite simply not cost-effective.
>>> The problem is that rpi has no fast storage interface (like SATA),
>>> some of
>>> the more expensive orangepis have sata. (though I'm not entirely sure
>>> if it
>>> is not bridged via usb)
>> Storage is one of the factors the HW developers mentioned. The system
>> using the Pi will be doing a LOT of information logging. I personally
>> don't know if it is a factor since all log info in coming in on a 10MBit
>> ethernet so it shouldn't overload the file system. We have a project
>> using a Blackfin that save data (in similar proportions) on a SDCard.
>
> I've got a normally very cautious engineer colleague who for the last two or 
> three years has been saving CCTV frames onto an SD-Card without problem. I 
> think he's still some way from filling it.
>
> My understanding is that there are two issues that need to be considered:
>
> i)  Each cell on that sort of device can only be written a certain number of 
> times before its performance degrades. For FAT etc. that includes the 
> directory area, which will be getting updated in situ even if the remainder 
> of the filesystem is only being written (i.e. to virgin blocks).
>
> ii) A power failure during a write or update is particularly risky.
>
> So far I've had an eMMC module and a couple of (identical) thumb drives fail 
> during normal operation, i.e. not through power removal.
>
> The article below, from the well-respected Bunnie Huang, illustrates some 
> interesting problems affecting what would be expected to be quality devices. 
> https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
>
> -- 
> Mark Morgan Lloyd
> markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
>
> [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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