Sourcing a used Plus?

Vera Controllers, Services & Devices Vera Controllers & Cameras
#1

Anyone have any tips on where to source a used VeraPlus? I have to move off of the VeraLite and am only considering a swap to another Vera controller because of my familiarity with it (the devil you know, as it were).

Been looking around a bit, but the prices are all over the map and there’s clearly no way to know who’s a reputable seller or not.

#2

VeraEdge are now at 90 USD/Eur or less. Migrating from a Lite to an Edge should be enough and you’ll notice performance improvements. If you don’t have invested in ZigBee, an Edge is enough.

#3

Thanks. I don’t need ZigBee, but have heard more mixed reviews of the Edge compared to the Plus. Given that there are Plus devices out there for $70 and under in the used market, it seemed reasonable to step up just a tad more for what might only amount to a few bucks overall.

#4

The problem with used veras is that you don’t know how used was the nand flash and it deteriorates quite quickly. With a new one, you’re sure it will last longer.

Anyway, you can factory reset and pair it again. Just be sure to ask the vendor to disassociate the device before.

#5

What type of flash is used in the devices? SLC, DLC, or TLC/MLC?

#6

I don’t know bit there are a lot of reports here. Look also at https://community.getvera.com/t/veraplus-flash-drive-usage/200467

#7

It is a specialty SLC made by Macronix. You can actually even get the chip model from the bootup logs. In spite of being SLC, it is the write intensity over a very small allocation of the chip which is the problem.

#8

How does a flash storage system NOT have appropriate logic to distribute the write operations? Unless the storage is “full” or the partitioning done in a way that puts a high-write location in a specific area of the disk, this should never happen.

Is this specific to the Plus?

#9

It is true on all current veras. The flash like all storage drive has a partition table which allocates partitions to specific areas of the drive. On the veras, the working partition happens to be tiny.

#10

What kind of lifespan are devices seeing? My Lite is quite a few years old and I don’t believe I’ve encountered any storage failure issues. What causes one to fail quickly while another would run for a long time?

#11

Factors which affect the lifespan:

  1. Size of you user-data.json which really means how big your installation is in terms of devices and complexity of the devices.
  2. Plugins: The larger, the more you have the more space is occupied leaving even less space for the user data which is constantly overwritten.
  3. Luck. I estimated in my use case that I run a very high risk of failures within 3 years. It may vary quite a bit. But… some failures may occur much sooner. I had a brand new vera with a few bad sectors which according to the specs is to be expected.

My oldest vera lite failed this way. All my units show some degree of failure from which the vera can recover after a reboot and the OS blacklists the sector as bad and won’t try to use it. The data which was there was lost however.

#12

I don’t want to jinx myself but I bought my my plus used off of ebay about 3 years ago. No issues so far.

#13

@rafale77 Does your savespace utility address this?

#14

It should help a great deal by moving the user-data file from a partition from a 8-10MB with only 1-2MB free to a partition which has 50MB with 45MB free. The free space is what the OS has to work with so yes you are likely to see up to a 20X lifetime improvement that way.
A version of it will be implemented in 7.0.30 from what I understand as @edward and I have discussed this workaround.

#15

Great, I have had it implemented since you released it.