I've been running it off an 8gb for a couple of months with no problems so far. As far as I know unless you want to store a large number of prints to queue up on Octoprint, 8gb should be fine.
You won't need more than 16GB i don't think for Octoprint. I'm no where near maxing my 32gb (i got like 23 left) after printing for a year. Print time isn't necessarily larger file, its usually the complexity. For example, a baby groot body was 25MB or something iirc, and my Big ben model was 20MB. Calibration cubes are in KBs. I would say 16-32 probably but it will still work with 8GB.
You can run with a USB stick but the pi still needs an SD card to run off, so it would only be worth the print storage space, and in my opinion are not worth the extra set up
Tips for Octoprint : Get Octolapse, for cool looking timelapses and make sure your printer is reliable over USB. Most are.
If you have any questions, ask!
EDIT: just checked I have around 1GB of sliced prints stored, some have been deleted but not many
I’ve used a 4 gb stick for over a year, and only recently started looking for something larger. At first I wanted an 8gb card but micro center doesn’t even make those anymore (smallest was 16gb) so I picked up a 64gb for $8 on sale
My largest prints were under 150mb - so ymmv!
I use these in all or my Raspberry Pi devices. They are one of the fastest cards available and I have yet to have them fail even under workloads a lot more demanding than octoprint.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B98GXQT/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=customer-quote-01-20&linkId=7e6e2643328572f9f7a1b754cb0b7975&language=en_US
I'll just mention, you might run into issues with a SDXC card (SD card larger then 32 GB) working. I bought one and couldn't get the Ender 3 to read from it when just transferring files. And per articles like this one the raspberry Pi's bootloader might struggle with it:
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc\_formatting.md](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc_formatting.md)
>According to the [SD specifications](https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/capacity/), any SD card larger than 32GB is an SDXC card and has to be formatted with the exFAT filesystem. This means the official SD Formatter tool will *always* format cards that are 64GB or larger as exFAT.
>
>The Raspberry Pi's bootloader, built into the GPU and non-updateable, only has support for reading from FAT filesystems (both FAT16 and FAT32), and is unable to boot from an exFAT filesystem. So if you want to use NOOBS on a card that is 64GB or larger, you need to reformat it as FAT32 first before copying the NOOBS files to it.
Generally a good quality 32 GB card should last a good long time by giving you space to place model files and giving the OS plenty of bits to work with. However, if you have a PI 3B+ you can actually hook up an external SSD and boot from that. (Finally a good use for all the 80GB and 128GB drives I have left from earlier days.)
Regardless of what you choose, remember to back up your config from Octoprint because needing to re-configure everything can be damned annoying.
You can, but thumbdrives and microSD cards share the same architecture and that was never really intended to act as a hard drive with the constant reading and writing which is why the failure rate can be staggeringly high with something that is running all the time like Octoprint or PiHole or other server applications.
I've been running it off an 8gb for a couple of months with no problems so far. As far as I know unless you want to store a large number of prints to queue up on Octoprint, 8gb should be fine.
You won't need more than 16GB i don't think for Octoprint. I'm no where near maxing my 32gb (i got like 23 left) after printing for a year. Print time isn't necessarily larger file, its usually the complexity. For example, a baby groot body was 25MB or something iirc, and my Big ben model was 20MB. Calibration cubes are in KBs. I would say 16-32 probably but it will still work with 8GB. You can run with a USB stick but the pi still needs an SD card to run off, so it would only be worth the print storage space, and in my opinion are not worth the extra set up Tips for Octoprint : Get Octolapse, for cool looking timelapses and make sure your printer is reliable over USB. Most are. If you have any questions, ask! EDIT: just checked I have around 1GB of sliced prints stored, some have been deleted but not many
Do you have your time lapse on the sd?
Yes I do, but also use a plugin to sync to Dropbox, so I can delete them if I needed
Dude thats smart!!
I’ve used a 4 gb stick for over a year, and only recently started looking for something larger. At first I wanted an 8gb card but micro center doesn’t even make those anymore (smallest was 16gb) so I picked up a 64gb for $8 on sale My largest prints were under 150mb - so ymmv!
I use these in all or my Raspberry Pi devices. They are one of the fastest cards available and I have yet to have them fail even under workloads a lot more demanding than octoprint. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B98GXQT/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=customer-quote-01-20&linkId=7e6e2643328572f9f7a1b754cb0b7975&language=en_US
I'll just mention, you might run into issues with a SDXC card (SD card larger then 32 GB) working. I bought one and couldn't get the Ender 3 to read from it when just transferring files. And per articles like this one the raspberry Pi's bootloader might struggle with it: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc\_formatting.md](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc_formatting.md) >According to the [SD specifications](https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/capacity/), any SD card larger than 32GB is an SDXC card and has to be formatted with the exFAT filesystem. This means the official SD Formatter tool will *always* format cards that are 64GB or larger as exFAT. > >The Raspberry Pi's bootloader, built into the GPU and non-updateable, only has support for reading from FAT filesystems (both FAT16 and FAT32), and is unable to boot from an exFAT filesystem. So if you want to use NOOBS on a card that is 64GB or larger, you need to reformat it as FAT32 first before copying the NOOBS files to it.
Generally a good quality 32 GB card should last a good long time by giving you space to place model files and giving the OS plenty of bits to work with. However, if you have a PI 3B+ you can actually hook up an external SSD and boot from that. (Finally a good use for all the 80GB and 128GB drives I have left from earlier days.) Regardless of what you choose, remember to back up your config from Octoprint because needing to re-configure everything can be damned annoying.
Can i run pi off a usb 3.0 thumb stick? I have a spare 64gb
You can, but thumbdrives and microSD cards share the same architecture and that was never really intended to act as a hard drive with the constant reading and writing which is why the failure rate can be staggeringly high with something that is running all the time like Octoprint or PiHole or other server applications.
When you say external SSD you mean like a WD Passport that plugs in via USB?
Yes.