Raspberry Pi Storage media choices

[Tracy]

I really only trust the SanDisk SD cards now, and am partial to the Extreme Plus ones. If I can't find them, I'll settle for the Extreme Pro's.
I've played with the Samsung, PNY, Kingston, Lexar and some other no-name ones.. and I keep coming back to the SanDisk.

The Extreme Plus/Pro ones are not cheap... I think I paid around $60 USD for the last two I got. I also use the San Disk Extreme for "spares" of my current RPi installs. I burn an image from my working setup and then use balenaEtcher to burn it out to the spare card.
I priced a 1TB Extreme and for what I would pay for it, I can get a nice external SSD hard drive for less than it. Main reason I would go larger is for more storage for the RPi.. but the transfer rate for the SD card won't be much different than USB 3.

 

[OhNo]

Well we got the burnin' device in common! I don't know why ppl insist on using such big storage on the RPi. It's not like you can process on it. And IF it gets corrupted or fails you are just out a lot of bucks. I can image every night the sky allows for a month and still have lots of room on a 64GB card.

At the end of each night I transfer that evenings data for the RPi in the obs to (ASI533MC P individual images file average about 17MB/ASI183MM P average 40MB each) to my processing 'puter in the house via Ethernet. Takes seconds. I have a file directory for each scope/camera combo. I process the images from these files. Atthe end of the month I transfer the raw data files and the finished images to a external HD.

Easy peezy, Sure the files on the external drive are third generation but they are still better than my ole memory!!!!

 

[Tracy]

I have a cron job set up to run every 3 minutes to copy new files from my default capture device over to my external hard drive.
That way, even if the RPi card dies (which I don't trust them as much as a drive) I will have the data sitting on another form of media automatically. I may miss some, but it will be fairly synchronized.

Original rsync example I based it off of

rsync -S -vrltH -pgo --stats -D --numeric-ids --delete --partial /path/to/source/dir/ /path/to/destination/dir

I simply created a file in my /etc/cron.d and set it to run the command every 3 minutes with root privilege. The script deletes any files that are in the destination folder that are not in the source folder.... so once you have archived your captures on the SD card and moved them to a secure environment and emptied that directory out, it will delete all the old files on the external drive.

 

[OhNo]

I tried to get a external drive to work with my SM OS in a ASIAir Pro, finally gave up. You do "house calls"?

 

[Tracy]

I tried to get a external drive to work with my SM OS in a ASIAir Pro, finally gave up. You do "house calls"?

My WD Passport was recognized immediately when I plugged it in. It mounts itself under the /media/stellarmate/<drive name> on my Stellarmate OS install... didn't have to do anything special with it. I haven't tried one with Astroberry yet to see how it does.
I made a symlink to it in my stellarmate user home directory called external so I don't have to mess with spaces in the file name.

 

[OhNo]

Now you're talkin' over my head. I am a grease under the fingernails, busted knuckles kinda guy. I can make almost any machine work. 'puter stuff not so much!

 

[Tracy]

Jack of all trades, master of few in my case. I learned how to work on small engines by helping a neighbor that lived a few houses up from me when I was a kid (around 10 years old). And being your proverbial East Texas Redneck, I've messed with tractors, rebuilding motors, building (and wiring) cinderblock storage buildings, erecting pole barns, building pond piers and such growing up. I got into computers as a hobby and it spread out from there.

Honestly, if you are hooking up to the Stellarmate OS on an RPi, when you VNC into the device, open up a terminal window and do a simple:
cd /media
dir
If you see stellarmate then
cd ./stellarmate
dir
and you should see your external HD listed. I do have a suggestion... if you haven't renamed it in Windows yet, I'd suggest you do so. My WD Passport was named My Passport and that space is a pain in the posterior to deal with in scripts... I simply renamed it on my Windows 11 desktop to External_HD1.

I do plan on getting a powered USB 3.0 hub that will run off my battery pack.. that way, I can reduce the power load on the RPi.

BTW, I may split this last stuff off into the Software section.