Maximize your Pi's micro SD card lifespan

Reduce writes to your micro SD card

Normally, writing data isn't an issue for SSDs or HDDs. However, your Raspberry Pi's SD card was not really intended for extensive write operations. The more you write to the SD card, the faster it will wear out. So setting up your system to write its log files and temporary files to write to RAM instead is a short and simple way to extend the life of your micro SD card.

Of course, you will lose your logs everytime you reboot.

These suggestions assume that you have a decent amount of extra RAM on your Pi (8GB ideally). You may also want to consider disabling your swap file. When your OS is out of RAM and needs additional space it will write the overflow to your disk. The downside to disabling the swap is that programs could crash if you max out your RAM usage. All of these 3 options below really depend on how you're using your Pi. If you plan to leave it running for months at a time, you may want your log file and temporary file sizes to be 100M or larger. If you plan to only use your Pi on a day-to-day basis the sizes could be much smaller.

Use a RAM disk for log files

1. Backup your logs (optional)

   sudo cp -r /var/log /var/log.backup

2. Edit the fstab file

   sudo nano /etc/fstab

   Add this line to the file and change 100M to fit your needs:

   tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=100M 0 0

3. Reload the systemd config

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload

4. Remount the /var/log directory

   sudo mount -a

5. Verify that /var/log is mounted as tmpfs

   df -h /var/log

   You should see that /var/log is using tmpfs with the allocated size.

Use a RAM disk for temporary files

As with logging above, we can do the same for /tmp files. Depending on what you're doing, you may want to even set up an external SSD, rather than use your RAM for /tmp.

1. Edit the fstab file

   sudo nano /etc/fstab

   Add this line to the file and change 256M to fit your needs:

   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,size=256M 0 0

2. Reload the systemd config

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload

3. Remount the /var/log directory

   sudo mount -a

4. Verify that /var/log is mounted as tmpfs

   df -h /var/log

   You should see that /var/log is using tmpfs with the allocated size.

Disable swap

When your Pi runs out of RAM it will write to a swap file on your SD card. This acts as a virtual memory space. To disable your swap, enter the following commands: