SD Card size? 256gb worth it?

General Discussions
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Hi Umbrel Community!

I’ve been running an Umbrel BTC Node on a Raspi 4gb for several months now and decided it’s time to upgrade. While looking around I found a nice case, a fancy cpu cooler, the recommended SSD etc.
At some point I was like, you know what?!? Let me buy a 8gb Raspi instead for some better performance, let’s go! So I ordered everything including a 256gb Samsung Evo SD card…

While flashing the SD card using Balena Etcher it notified me that the SD card is unusually large, do you want to continue… That made me think, does it make any sense to use such a large capacity SD card? Happy to hear anyones input.

Thanks in advance!

Xantoshi

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I’ve been using 16GB microSDHC cards and have had no reason to go any larger thus far.

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Anyone using a 1 TB SD to store the whole blockchain in it? This way there is no need for an external ssd.

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No no, the 256gb SD is for booting and some additional Linux storage. I’m also having a 1TB SSD attached for the blockchain

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@Carlos I thought about trying that in the beginning. Was told by many not to bother. With (any type of) blockchain, there are many reads & writes. Doing that many IOPS on a sdhc card will likely cause a quick failure.

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I had issues when using a large microsd card. I had to follow these instructions to format it as FAT32 before using.

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Makes sense. Thanks for your reply!

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8

Can i remove the sd card after booting

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Yeah, unless the 1.0 update changed it, Umbrel requires at least 1 TB external storage device, and at least 16 GB SD card.
Only the OS boots off the SD card, and as of version 1.0, any changes made to the base OS on it are reverted at restart, so there’s no reason at all to have anything greater than 16 GB SD.
The reason Umbrel requires that 1 TB external drive is all of your data and apps are on it. If anything happens to the base OS on SD card, you can just re-flash it and continue with your external data where you left off. Not sure why 1 TB was required back when I started, and not certain if it’s changed since the 1.0 update.