Can I use the SD card port of my laptop to install a server?
Can I use the SD card port of my laptop to install a server?
Hey! Long story short, I'm interested in Self hosting stuff and want to wet my feet a bit with a spare laptop I have. The main nvme drive is used by windows 10, and it has a 250 Go SD card.
I've been trying to install TrueNAS Scale and YunoHost on the SD card to no avail. I have seen people on forums say they had stuff installed on an SD card but I'm starting to doubt it.
Can it work? I think I need some help but I don't know what info might be useful.
Install an OS on the card to boot from? Its the same process as making a bootable live USB stick.
The performance will be poor in comparison to an SSD and will reduce the longevity of the card due to many r/w operations.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose or goal but wouldn't this be perfect use case for a virtual machine? I'm surprised no one has suggested that. A one off temporary, easily reverted back to pristine with snapshots sounds like exactly what you would want for testing something like this out.
Short answer: yes, you absolutely can.
But there are a lot of caveats (I did that with a usb stick): you need a light distro, ubuntu server in a nimble installation can work with that but if your server expands (like mine does) you will start to get a hard time.
So long answer: you probably shouldn’t do it if you can avoid it.
Came in here to say this. If you really want to play, get a cheap used hdd and mess around with that. An sd card will make your first experience more trouble than it's worth
100% agreed. I now have to figure out how to change my setup without disrupting everything.
So there's 2 things, I think.
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Does your bios allow you to boot from SD card? If so, then you can boot from the SD card and so you can install software onto the SD card directly.
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If you can't boot off of the SD card, then perhaps you can install all the software on the SD card and then install a boot manager on the main drive. In this way, you boot off the main drive, then let the boot manager deal with loading the software.
You might be disappointed by the performance of software running off an SD card, mind you.
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You understand that when you install it on the SD card and want to run it, then windows will not run at the same time, yes?
The other option would be a Virtual machine like someone else suggested.
Yes our servers running esxi boot from an SD card
But. That’s not to say you won’t have issues.
As others are saying distro matters
Unraid works this way too. Its perfectly fine as long as you keep frequent writes off it. Use ramdisk when you need scratch space.
Not exactly the answer for the question you ask but you mention yunohost.. i recently installed it and it was impossible from their iso. Install debian first and then use it to install yunohost there
As long as you can select the SD card in the bios boot menu, you should be able to install an OS there and run anything. Just be aware that the life of the SD card will be short if your server write data continuously to the SD card (e.g. excessive logging). Even if you don't do any excessive write, SD cards tend to have shorter life than SSD anyway, so make sure you have a disaster recovery plan so you won't get caught off guard when your SD card suddenly fails.