Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-3-model-bplus-sale-now-35/

Thanks for the update!

Am I mistaken, or is there no SD card slot on that unit?

The reason I ask is that I once had an earlier version Raspberry Pi that suffered from SD card data corruption. I had to recover from backup after every 4 or 5 boots, which made the thing utterly useless. I swore that I’d never have another one if it used an SD card for the boot drive.

After reading a few reviews about the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+, it looks like the latest version has the same Micro SD slot that is on the Raspberry Pi 3 B.

I have had one SD card that corrupted, and I am not sure why it happened and the other three cards were fine.

I must have tried over a dozen different SD cards. Different brands, different model numbers. All of them got corrupted. Decided never to buy another RPi. Might look at one of the competing brands though.

One possible solution may be with the new formatting program. I can’t remember the name of it at the moment. Older formatting programs always seemed to cause corruption. The new formatting program is significantly faster and stable. To format a new as card was only a minute or so, while the old 32-bot version required about 20 minutes to format.

Maybe try one of the old sd cards and see if this issue is solved.

Okay, thanks. I’ll check it out.

you might want to try Etcher.app or Pi Bakery(on a mac) to format and install the iso, i’ve never ever had any issues with any SD card on a raspberry Pi.

I stick with Samsung Evos and Sandisk cards. I’ve had issues with some brands. Last bad one I got was a PNY that was on sale. Green color I think. It went bad within 6 months. The symptom was no changes would be saved to the card after rebooting the pi. It would seem to work for the most part but I would get weird errors. Reboot and previous changes would be gone and everything was working again, until another weird error came up.

Cloned that card to a samsung and that Pi server has been fine for over a year now IIRC.

mainly aimed @Robert Weaver:-

i had a long year on a project using the Pi, eventually i scrapped it, mainly due to the OS but also a significant number of issues with the SD card.
after looking into those issues i found that i could corrupt a card purposefully almost every time in the process of finding the issue.
my conclusion was that neither the SD can nor the Pi was causing the corruption due to an inherent product flaw, rather the lack of power management in the system when dealing with abnormal system shutdown, sudden poor loss, spikes on the supply, USB overload or level differences in cables plugged in.

I had loads of images of the working SD cards which saved hours of time whenever these issues occurred, a real must to stop hair being pulled out!

all this can be cured wth a large enough back up supply (some form of battery or very large Super Capacitor), BUT that then adds too much baggage for most applications, even if it is essential for a real world product that i was hoping to develop to replace a bespoke hardware/software platform, which is what was eventually done, eliminating every issue faced in the Pi development.

if there was a method of attaching a nonvolatile (and cheap) boot memory this may cure the majority of issues that stopped the product development i was doing with the Pi.

lesson learned, Pi has its place, but it will not replace a bespoke design in many real world products.

I’d also suspected power supply problems, and had planned to build a beefy linear supply to replace the switch mode supply, but I lost interest in the thing before getting around to it. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to hijack this topic, but seeing what appeared to by a RPi without the dreaded SD slot had got me all excited.

You can boot the Raspi 3 and 3B+ from USB without using an SD card. I have a USB to m.2 SSD 2242 converter “thumb” drive and boot from SSD through USB without an SD. You can also boot the older Raspi models with a minimal Fat-32 boot partition on the SD and the OS image on USB and then point the boot cmdline.txt to the sda2 partition. Much faster boot and operation times.

I have a Pi that’s been in service for over a year without problems.

Linux (and other unix variants) keep track of 3 timestamps for every file:
Created, Modified, and Accessed .
It is possible to turn off the access time (atime) feature, but not all Raspbian images do by default.

Since booting the system can access a couple thousand files,
when atime is active, a few boot cycles will probably shred a SD card.

Take a look at SSD Optimization
for this and other ways of prolonging SSD life.