Is Gentoo bad for a microSD

[thegrind]

I have a microSD on a Rpi5. I am looking to compile a kernel and headless chromium. Will all this emerging and compiling really chew up my card? I bought a better performing but I'd like to move it over after I'm done with some heavy compiling/emerging. Thoughts?

[Zucca]

I'd maybe use an USB stick to store Portage temporary files (PORTAGE_TMPDIR).
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[Banana]

They have improved over the years, but I would suggest either: Build on different PC, use binhost or use an extranl drive on your Pi.
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[pa4wdh]

I have been running a Raspberry Pi 2 based NTP server since 2016 running Gentoo from a microSD card. It's biggest compile job is gcc (running the job from disk and using lots of swap because it only has 1GB of memory). So far i've replaced the SD card twice, but never because it failed. I usually get low on space for the rootfs and wait for nice discounts on cards.
Now it has a 128GB Samsung card i bought for about 20 euros using f2fs as a filesystem. As far as i know sdcards don't have smart-like functions so i can't tell how much has been read/written on the card.
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[Naib]

Things have improved but the old trope still exists (but is still something to be mindful of)... >100,000writes means you are likely to face physical failure before bit failure.
Gentoo and linux does increase the number of writes but there are some things you can do to prolong it

1. disable atime
2. disable logging - or selectively
3. use a non-journaled FS (or use FSFS)
4. use gentoo binhost
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[flysideways]

With the Pi 5 comes the option of using an nvme adapter.

This is from an sd card in a Pi 5

[NeddySeagoon]

Personally, if you must use an SD card, choose a good quality card, not a noname one and over provision it.
Many SD cards do wear levelling now, so F2FS will fight the inbuilt wear levelling, if you have it.

Does fstrim -av trim your card, or is trim not supported for you?
That's a good thing to do once a month to keep free space erased to keep write speeds up.
if trim is supported, you probabably have wear levelling too but there is no way to be sure.

I use a 512Gb Sandisk card with a desktop install. It want's to build Chromium every week.
Its a ~arm64 install except Chromium, which is stable.

The only reason I don't use NVMe is that Pi5 has to be silent, so passively cooled.
Maybe I could do some metalwork to use a bottom NVMe but that's for the future.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[pingtoo]

I use RPI5 for my daily drive. It is gentoo based on SD card. However I seldom compile on it. I use other nodes on my network that provide NBD then I pool those NBD with LVM and mount the lv as /var/tmp. Just give you some idea for possible workaround the SD card write concern.

[Goverp]

[pingtoo]

Goverp,

Thank you for sharing your f2fs experience. I think I will try it for my next stage4 build for rpi5. However I have one concern. I remember from somewhere it suggest f2fs are tie to kernel. i.e change kernel version may cause the file system on disk not usable. Is this true? or it was but changed so now it no longer is the case?

[Ralphred]