PiHole hard on SD cards?

[jayjr]

No Issue here really, just wondering if I should consider a more durable SD card for my setup or an eMMC. I have a Pine64 board that was $20 a few years ago. It's overkill really for this purpose but I run debain linux with pihole and a dynamic dns service and that's it. Wondering if PiHole is doing much writing to the SD card at all or mostly just "functioning" from it. TIA.

[jfb]

Pi-hole is not particulary hard on SD cards. I have multiple Pi's running Pi-hole for 4+ years continuously with no problems.

If SD card wear is a concern to you, there are options offered in Pi-hole to reduce or eliminate most logging to the SD card.

1. Disable query logging to the query database by setting the parameter

   MAXDBDAYS=0

in file /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf

https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/configfile/#maxdbdays

2. To disable logging to the dnsmasq log at /var/log/pihole.log, use the web admin GUI > Settings > System > Disable query logging. Note that if you do this, you lose the ability to live tail the log.

[RonV42]

A agree with @jfb I have a Pi-hole running with the same SD card over 4 years and Pi-hole running in various configurations, native, docker, using Cloudflare proxy, using DNScrypt proxy, etc. The key is to use a reliable SD card in the Pi.

There are a lot of good articles out there of how to reduce wear on the SD card:

Reducing SD Card Wear on a Raspberry Pi or Armbian Device # Chris Dzombak

[jayjr]

Here's my running services, what can I disable safely?...

dietpi@DietPi:~$ sudo systemctl --type=service --state=running
  UNIT                       LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION
  cron.service               loaded active running Regular background program processing daemon
  ddclient.service           loaded active running Update dynamic domain name service entries
  dropbear.service           loaded active running LSB: Lightweight SSH server
  getty@tty1.service         loaded active running Getty on tty1
  haveged.service            loaded active running Entropy Daemon based on the HAVEGE algorithm
  lighttpd.service           loaded active running Lighttpd Daemon
  pihole-FTL.service         loaded active running LSB: pihole-FTL daemon
  serial-getty@ttyS2.service loaded active running Serial Getty on ttyS2
  systemd-journald.service   loaded active running Journal Service
  systemd-udevd.service      loaded active running Rule-based Manager for Device Events and Files
  vmtouch.service            loaded active running vmtouch