Limit SD Card writes on Rasberry Pi using Ramlog

It’s well-established that SD cards have a finite lifespan. This lifespan is dependent on the number of writes that you do to the card (although the number of reads is largely irrelevant). Alexander van der Sar has blogged about using a piece of software called Ramlog. At boot time, the current logs are read into memory, then subsequent log writes are done directly to RAM, therefore not using the SD card. The logs are then written at shutdown time to the SD card, thus minimising the number of writes. Read about this here.

Thanks to Peter Scargill who went through the pain of finding some instructions that worked!

2 comments for “Limit SD Card writes on Rasberry Pi using Ramlog

  1. Another nice find. I am going to use this for boards other than the Pi that use SD cards.
    Currently I am installing it on my sama5d3-xplaine board which I use to run octoprint and display information via an LCD panel.
    Ramlog will definitely come in handy.

    Thanks
    Greg

  2. Just tried this. Looks useful. You DO need to do sudo insserv and two reboots after changes. (xdrp created a problem and had to be added to the BEGIN INIT INFO as described for say cups to get mine working.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.