Speed v.s. reliability

[djole94hns]

I am wondering, is installing Raspbian on external storage (trough BerryBoot 2.0) a good idea?
Is filesystem corruption a lesser problem when installing to an external USB hard drive?

I guess it's also a bit slower, but if there is a significant difference in reliability, I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of speed.
I need my build to be as stable as possible, with lots of reads and writes to the disk.

Thanks in advance!

[ktb]

I am wondering, is installing Raspbian on external storage (trough BerryBoot 2.0) a good idea?

I don't know. Maybe.

Is filesystem corruption a lesser problem when installing to an external USB hard drive?

Yes, usually.

I guess it's also a bit slower, but if there is a significant difference in reliability, I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of speed.
I need my build to be as stable as possible, with lots of reads and writes to the disk.

Thanks in advance!

It's usually faster (than any SD cards I've tried in a Pi).

[DavidS]

I am wondering, is installing Raspbian on external storage (trough BerryBoot 2.0) a good idea?
Is filesystem corruption a lesser problem when installing to an external USB hard drive?

I guess it's also a bit slower, but if there is a significant difference in reliability, I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of speed.
I need my build to be as stable as possible, with lots of reads and writes to the disk.

Thanks in advance!

USB drives are generally both more reliable and faster than SD-Cards. Though you did not say what kind of USB Drive.

[LitterBugs]

Why not have speed AND reliability? Take the time and spend the money to get a quality name brand SD card and/or hard drive. If you just pick up the cheapest thing or the first thing you find, you are probably not going to have either and are more likely to have problems. Unfortunately looking at a storage device and/or the speed/class ratings of it does nothing to tell you what controller or memory type it is made from. Cheap storage may not have good wear leveling and error correction or may have a higher failure rate. USB storage can provide both faster transfer rates and larger capacity than the SD card slot. Remember that the Ethernet port shares the USB bus, so if you are doing a lot of network IO, that may reduce your external disk IO.

Generalizing "lots of reads and writes" without saying what the system will be used for or if anything else will be sharing the USB bus makes it hard to do much other than provide a generic response.

Cheers!
LitterBugs

[solar3000]

I am wondering, is installing Raspbian on external storage (trough BerryBoot 2.0) a good idea?
Is filesystem corruption a lesser problem when installing to an external USB hard drive?

I guess it's also a bit slower, but if there is a significant difference in reliability, I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of speed.
I need my build to be as stable as possible, with lots of reads and writes to the disk.

Thanks in advance!

why do you need berryboot?
I run one of my pis off of a notebook drive. the sd card has raspbian, but only for the boot partition. then it mounts the external notebook drive.

[clintcornell2]

I will try too

[Jednorozec]

I have a great dislike for BerryBoot because of the compressed file system that it uses. I'm using a SATA hard drive in a powered USB docking station formatted with a number of ext4 16GB partitions. Swapping sd cards gives me a bunch of different OS installations that run off the hard drive so everything is faster, more reliable and the speed of the sd card doesn't really matter.