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Comment by cjbconnor | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

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Using f2fs and setting up the SW on my SBCs to not write data needlessly to SD card all the time (some programs are really bad at this), and having a very high quality power supply and cabling was enough to make my boards work for years on a single SD card. Some are at 4 years currently and still work fine. I'm using Sandisk only, since a few years ago, because it's the only manufacturer that allows me to verify online whether the card I bought is genuine and provides A1 rated cards at the same time. Experience with about 20 boards.

We shouldn't have to do that or special USB boot things that don't integrate well with extra cables sticking out of the form factor.

Samsung provides authentication software for their sd cards too.

does it run on linux or do i need windows to run that? because if windows is needed then sandisk can get a chunk of my salary.

It's a windows tool.

Now that's interesting. I have a few dead samsung uSD cards, that I'd check for genuineness, if possible. I suspect they might have been a cheap clone.

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/...

I guess too little too late. None of the 4 dead Samsung cards I could find have the V mark (too old for that), required for validation, and they probably started adding support for regular EVO cards just a year ago or so.

I have a special SD card made up that has all of the correct boot configs set and a small script to update everything and set up the Pi for PXE boot. After everything is configured, I take out the SD card and let it just pull boot images over the network. My main home server serves everything up over tftp. The only downside is that you can't get this to work over wifi. The wifi Pis get read only SD cards that are all configured the same so it's easy to reimage a new one if the card dies.

This seemed to be such a frequent problem that I have up on ARM SBCs (despite how cool they are).

Bought a cheap NUC with a disk and a BIOS and it is working like a champ - boots every time. I probably paid a little more but it's enough for my needs - a simple login and (occasional) DLNA server.

NUCs costs much more than Pi, even used.

It costs more upfront, but it's worth it because I don't have to spend my time investigating why it's not working.

Also, when comparing costs you should take into account things like enclosure, power supply, as card(s) etc.

I'd say I probably paid around $250 or so for the NUC and a SODIMM and I had a SATA boot disk already. I had previously owned ODROID, libre computer (le potato), and Pi(s). These were probably in the ballpark of $80-$120 each, when including all the necessary equipment.

Agree on point paid more for features, but x2.5 price is debatable here.

I bought a cheap used ultra small form factor PC with an i5, 8GB of RAM, all for less than 200 USD. It even included a licensed copy of Windows 7 Pro, which I don't use.

Same here. I now run them read only.

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