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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

They make high-endurance SD cards these days. They have the same reliability (or better) as an SSD but in a small package and for relatively cheap. These should be used in virtually all Raspberry Pis that see any non-trivial amount of disk use.

RPi3+ also support booting from USB and Ethernet so you really don't need an SD card in a lot of cases either.

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> the same reliability (or better) as an SSD

Can you give examples of microSD cards like this? What googling for "high endurance" turns up are cards touting their use for video purposes (e.g. dash or security cameras that run 24/7). Continuous writes to video files, overwriting each memory cell every X period of time it takes to fill the card, is more punishing than other uses but it could still be far less than the thrashing caused by running an operating system for some tasks.

I've also seen the A1 and A2 classifications for higher IOPS cards, also good for running an OS, but independent of endurance.

https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/application/

I would consider "SLC" microSD cards to be "high-reliability" compared to MLC/TLC. However you pay for it - the cheapest 1GB SLC card on Digikey is $43 CAN[0].

Here is a helpful-looking image for selecting between different memory types [1]

[0] https://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/swissbit/SFSD1024N1... [1] https://www.cactus-tech.com/assets/images/a/Selector%20Guide...

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