Failing eMMC on Orange Pi 3

[Squatter]

My Opi3 has been running armbian for over 2 years (edge kernels & usually fully up-to-date).  I have been using eMMC & I noticed an apparent slowdown about 6 months ago.  As it performs cron-based tasks and is a stats collector, this performance was not noticable but doing a manual BIG dist-upgrade, it seems to take forever (20 minutes to do what should be under 5 minutes).

 

If I run "mmc extcsd read /dev/mmcblk1", the results tell me that the eMMC is at least 90% used whatever that really means.  Is this a sign of imminent failure ?  hdparm shows read results of 17 MB/s which is actually slower than my alternative SD card boot device and nearly 1/10th the result of a mounted flash disk (146 MB/s).

 

Am I right in assuming that the eMMC is really at the end of its life and I should look to move to an alternative primary storage for boot etc.  I do all of my "work" on a mounted flash drive so data loss is not an issue.

 

Is the way to go as follows : minimal boot from the eMMC or an SD card which switches ALL further OS work to the flash drive

 

How does one formally disable the eMMC storage entirely ?

 

Thanks

[Squatter]

I built Armbian fresh using sid this time as I have had zero problems with "Bookworm testing".  The new SD build still shows a severely performance-affected eMMC so I am pretending it doesn't exist anymore.  When a new fast flash drive arrives, I will use nand-sata-install with that.  I did note that with a bootable SD and a bootable eMMC, while nand-sata-install did copy stuff over, it would boot from the SD but mount the eMMC /boot directory.  Kernel upgrades would upgrade the eMMC mounted root but a reboot used the SD card version.  I will look to see if a manual change to the mounted root fixes that.

 

For the record, apart from the 1st 6 months in 2019 trying to use the vendor-supplied Linux (it was seriously flawed), I have been running Armbian successfully ever since.  Any errors being of my own making.

 

Thank you to the developers.