Lifetime of BBB

Hi everyone,

I work on a project where my BBB needs to be ON 24/7. So I was wondering if eventually that’s gonna be a problem. If anyone knows if this is going to affect my BBB (or how long it’ll work) I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks

Richard

So, how long is the 24/7 expected to continue?
Will it be running at a full 1GHZ 24/7 are will it use AVS?
What is the environment?

Gerald

I have a few Beagle-C4 in my server room that have been running
mostly* 24/7 since 2009...

*minus: reboots, moves, re-builds, etc..

Regards,

I have a collection of Beagles that run 24/7, some of which have been running for years without any issues.

For the new am335x processors TI promises 100000 hours of work

Which means 11 year :stuck_out_tongue:

Depending on the environment and speed.

Gerald

I think the most interesting part of this question is life-time of eMMC ( if used as main storage ). This isn’t question directly related to this forum, but anybody knows some estimating tool somewhere?
Like " if I have so much free space available on eMMC and I am writing so much of data per day (including logs and such), then my expected life time of the eMCC is ???".

I have no direct experience with eMCC. I do have experience with "industrial"
SD (and non-industrial) SD cards though. Based on that, I would suggest never
writing it unless you don't mind if it dies someday soon. Don't bother trying
to calculate how many flash writes you should be able to do before it dies,
they don't work anywhere near their theoretical limits. This thread tells
you how to ensure that you never mount anything read/write:

     https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beagleboard/9J2r8xn3-Os

It hasn't failed for me yet...

Of course maybe its all Angstrom's fault, I don't know.

Arduino/ATMega328P eeprom does seem to work as advertised you can keep
persistent data on one of those if its something small (rotate it around
a bit of course).

Britton

As I know , most eMMC support wear leave , and Micron engineer told me , their firmware support 10 or 12bit BCH ECC every 1024 BYTES

Totally , you can write 10000 (times) x 2G (chip size) on BBB board right ?

Theory and practice aren't the same on this one in my experience. "Industrial"
SD cards claim to have wear leveling, async shutdown tolerance etc. as well.
Again, it could be something in the Angstrom layer tying itself in knots,
I don't know.

Britton

For industry product, if you can mount it with read only , you’d better do

In some case ,if you need some log or some other information/data need to write to somewhere

work around way , run fsck every boot time .fstab change is enough ?

some tips to expand the life of your beagle :

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/169/how-can-i-extend-the-life-of-my-sd-card

Hi Gerald,

The BBB is being used as part of a home automation system and it’s being used inside an office environment. It’s running at a full 1GHz, but I don’t know anything about AVS. It’s ON all day.

AVS is automatic voltage scaling. It slows down the processor when it is not doing anything heavy.

Gerald

Err.. no. That would be DVFS (cpufreq in the kernel). AVS is for handling
the device variations in voltage around the different OPPs. But yes, if the
s/w support is present it should be enabled especially at higher
frequencies.