Raspberry Pi lifespan reliability

Question

I have to set up a three monitor display for a museum, that will run 24/7 , and I think about a simple Pi wall.

But I'd like to know if a Raspberry Pi is a good long term solution.

The system will run all day long, and I hope it can last at least 5 years without troubles.

It will run on UPS, with everything needed for autoreboot, and good SD cards.

I know that a computer with no moving parts is already a good idea for that purpose, but I can't find info about long term reliability of the Raspberry Pi (except about pure hardware failures on the Pi itself).

Is the Raspberry Pi suitable for such long term exploitation? Does anyone have info about years-long uptime with Raspberry Pi?

Answer 1

I assume you're talking about using the Pi for digital signage purposes. For the last years we have deployed hundreds of Pi's doing exactly that.

Many of our Pi's are not as lucky as yours: they're not on UPS and/or are on 'dirty' power lines. Lost phases, powercuts and power surge peaks are common. Roughly calculated we have about 1% failure - totally over all the years over all the Pis. This includes human originated damage.

Many people complain or warn about potential SD card failure. I mustn't pretend that this is not true. But I personally haven't had any issues with that. Granted, we don't write that often but we also don't avoid writing. If you not log every time the seconds change, I doubt that it's going to be an issue. Definitely not for digital signage.

Our setup generally is: Pi, $0.1 heatsink, $3 power adaptor, $1 HDMI cable, $0.01 plastic business card box casing with holes punched into them. For SD we use a variety of sizes and brands. Actually mostly non-brands; 4GB class 4 cards often collected from the bottom of drawers or pen holders. Or new $2 retail Sandisk class 4 cards. The stuff nobody wants. If I could buy them by the kilo I would.

So yes, IMHO the Pi will do absolutely fine in your museum!

Answer 2

I have been running a Java server on my raspberry pi for almost a year now, non stop, and it has not cut out yet.

Most likely, the reason we don't have data regarding how long they will last is because they're still a relatively new technology (Coming out Feb 2012) and no one (or not many people) have reported them to have died from extreme usage.

My advice is to go for it. If you're running something simple on it, then you will get a few years out of them in my opinion.

Answer 3

I realise this is not going to become an accepted answer, but I figured I'd dump some information I've accrued that may aid you choose an approach and this is too long for a comment.

I only have rumors to provide regarding SD card volatility. Personally I am just starting out with RPi and cannot provide concrete details or personal experience. But a close friend of mine told me I was most likely going to get frustrated with flash cards getting corrupt. He claim to have several cards die on him. I'd research card volatility if I were in your shoes, or trust other peoples advice. But if a card fries, perhaps it's not the end of the world if you have prepared SD cards to plug back in (the worst that happen is the museum wall is down until someone plugs a new card in). From what I understand, it's safe to read from cards, but writing to cards can cause corruption over time.

From a technical point of view, it should be possible to avoid writing to the SD card and instead write to another persistent medium over USB or network, for example. Unfortunately I don't know how to configure Raspbian or the boot loader for this. The operating system most likely will store memory pages on disk to manage memory, so even if you are not explicity writing to disk, the OS most likely will. With that in mind, configuring the OS to write to another disk (or over network) could be one way to reduce risk of hardware failure.

Another completely different approach could be to setup your PI to be a thin client that doesn't do much on its own and let a server do logic and persistance. In this setup, all your PI does is provide a graphics card, more or less.

As for ondulator, I don't know what that is. I just found hair products when I searched for it.

Unfortunately I have no concrete steps on how to configure an existing operating system to work as described in the above scenarios, but I would be surprised if it wasn't possible. Personally, since I have no commercial pressure, I'll just go with the SD card until I personally experience problems and then consider switching to a setup where I only use the SD card as a ROM bootstrap.

I greatly appreciate if the community downvote + leave comment with constructive criticism if I am providing seriously ill-based information. It's a great way to learn :)

Answer 4

Though this is an old thread, I think I should add my direct experience.

We run Pi cameras in remote locations, accessible only by backcountry airplanes or a multiday hike - Frank Church Wilderness. We have a few dozen of these out there and they have been running solidly 24/365.25. However, we have experienced perhaps 10 system failures that we have diagnosed to be Pi and SD card failures. We can't do much about the Pi failures so we are embarking on an effort to tune Raspbian and our software to minimize writes to the SD card.

Our operating environment is not friendly - the cameras are encased in outdoor camera housings mounted on a pole or a roof, exposed to temperatures from -10F to 100F. Power originates at a solar panel feeding deep cycle batteries converted to AC with a good inverter and feeding AdaFruit power supplies.

We're using PiZeros in most cases.