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Anyone ever used a 1TB (or larger) SD card in a Pi or Pi clone? (startrek.website)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by IcedRaktajino@startrek.website to c/raspberry_pi@programming.dev
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Specifically I'm using the OrangePi Zero 2W and the Banana Pi M4 Zero (both are Pi Zero form factor), but I figure if it works in a Raspberry Pi it should work in these. Wondering if they're worth the cost, if they work at all, and/or if it's just asking for trouble.

The project I'm working on requires a good bit of storage. It's essentially an "internet in a box" device that has a portable selection of media (Wikipedia dump, music, TV shows, movies, and books) as well as web-based software to view them (Kiwix, MPD+Snapcast, Jellyfin, Calibre-Web, etc) as well as some other utilities (PiHole for DNS/DHCP/ad blocking, Searx-NG, VPN clients and routing, etc).

The OrangePi is currently the working prototype, and it has a 512 GB SD card and a 512GB USB-connected NVMe. Due to a quirky wifi chip, it requires a separate USB wifi adapter to do hotspot. Because of this, it kind of sprawls and isn't very portable without disassembly.

The Banana Pi has a better wifi chip and can do hotspot internally. So to keep my portable server keychain sized, I'd like to outfit it with either a 1 TB or 1.5 TB SD card for its media store rather than attaching a USB->NVMe enclosure. This one also has eMMC for the system, so it wouldn't be booting from or writing logs, etc to the SD card. Most of the data/media on the SD card would be WORM (write once, read many) but would be updated/refeshed periodically.

Would a large 1 or 1.5 TB SD card (Samsung or Sandisk, depending on price) be a waste of money or be a cause of issues?

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[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 2 points 2 months ago

Genuinely curious. Why exFAT? (I didn't downvote you, BTW).

I've not had any issues using ext4 for my Pi's SD cards. Any issues due to improper shutdowns are fixed with journal recovery. I also like to set a fairly high commit time in the mount options (120 seconds usually). Worst case is I lose the last 2 minutes of data, but it seems to work well to coalesce the writes (especially for things like Jellyfin or anything that uses SQLite and does a lot of constant little writes).

[-] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 3 points 2 months ago

Well yes, if you know what your doing then the best would ext4.

I've not changed commit times before, but I would still avoid heavy write situations

this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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