TF card for PGDATA
What are the pros and cons of using a TF card to store data?
It seems like a good idea, because there are no moving parts, but are there
other points of failure that make this a bad idea?
On Oct 8, 2022, at 17:14, Theodore M Rolle, Jr. <stercor@gmail.com> wrote:
What are the pros and cons of using a TF card to store data?
Assuming by TF you mean Transflash, a trade name for SD cards, the bandwidth on them is not particularly spectacular. The absolute fastest is an SDUC card at ~980Mb/s, and real-life performance of them will be considerably lower than that (especially given that the interfaces that SDUC cards tend to be mounted with are not really design for high speed).
The performance is going to be especially bad in a PostgreSQL environment with constant fsync()-like operations, and the file systems that typically are used on SD cards are not really designed for high performance. (exFAT is not exactly a speed demon.)
Write wear on SD media is also going to be an issue pretty fast.
PostgreSQL will run on SD cards (I've build and run PostgreSQL on Raspberry Pi systems that use SD cards as their secondary storage), but it's not something I'd consider for a serious server.