I am working on a project, which currently is a pet project and am using Raspberry Pi model B+ for it. But, while working this prototype a few questions have started coming up, so my question is in two parts,
Raspberry Pi B+ questions
Help would be greatly appreciated.
Has anyone performed or use Raspberry Ri for a 24x7x365 day scenario? How does it hold up running all the time?
I have one I've left on all the time for more than a year. It is not super busy (mostly, serves files on a home LAN, logs some sensor data, and keeps an led indicator updated) but it has never been a problem.
Can we something other than an SD card, since I have read SD cards tend to crash
I think it is worth considering that someone who has a SD card related problem is likely to post a question or something somewhere online, whereas someone who does not isn't going to leave a trail of "Hey, my SD card is fine, how's yours?" all over the internet.
By analogy, if you had never owned or used a traditional spinning disk hard drive, you might be inclined to ask, after looking around the web, "Can I use something other than a disk drive, since I have read these tend to break down?". They do indeed tend to break down and anyone who has used one long enough will have seen it happen.
None-the-less, lots of people use lots of spinning disks and most of them are fine most of the time. SD cards do have a limited lifespan, but it is considerable. I've actually put a lot of effort into trying to destroy them to prove this point, and I'm pretty satisfied they are what they appear to be: Like spinning disks, they do not last forever, but they should last for years of reasonably normal use. My 24/7 pi mentioned earlier is still on its first card and I'm not worried about it. Likewise, I have an android phone that's a few years old with an SD card -- probably that gets worked more than the one in the pi -- still fine.
However, I do use an attached usb drive for larger storage. If you are truly paranoid, or there are particular aspects of the filesystem you know get worked a lot, you could move those there. Note that by default raspbian uses RAM for /tmp, /run, and swap, so that stuff is okay. The rest of the system doesn't do a lot of writing and if that's all that's up, the card could last longer than you will.
This question is very wide and has multiple best answers depending on what the device is meant to do. The only thing i can say for sure is that SD cards, besides they crash tendency, have quite short lifetime if they work under heavy load (Lots of I/O for ex.) What i'd do to help this is to make a script that copies SD content to an external disk connected via USB or seek for solutions that does not involve big IO load for SDcard. There are distros capable of booting from a disk, then storing everything in RAM or somwhere else, to a level where after boot it's possible to remove the disk and the system will be still up and running.
Anyways, we can't help you now since your question is not precise enough.
