Do you mean the microSD cards tend to wear out, or that they’re DOA?
If the former — I’m pretty sure there’s an option to load RaspberryOS into a RAM-resident mode (like a live CD) where regular OS usage won’t hit the disk at all, and only a “Local Documents” partition is mounted writable, with nothing configured to implicitly write to it by default.
If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it.
> broken connectors
The microSD connector? In an educational context, that shouldn’t be end-user exposed. It’s essentially a maintenance port. Stick some tape over it.
In the computer labs of the 90s, kids would break the CD-ROM drive trays, too. MDM software was developed that would, among other things, lock out the CD-tray eject mechanism unless/until a teacher enabled it (presumably for working through some whole-class “multimedia” product that never materialized, because who’d trust kids to insert the CDs?)
> If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it.
SD cards and USB flash drives are manufactured with lower-grade flash memory than SATA and NVMe SSDs. The stuff that wears out in RPi usage is the stuff that was rejected for desktop usage. So having a large failure rate is not the only option, if you can expose a SATA or PCIe port. It's a little disappointing that they cannot even offer end users that upgrade path.
Do you mean the microSD cards tend to wear out, or that they’re DOA?
If the former — I’m pretty sure there’s an option to load RaspberryOS into a RAM-resident mode (like a live CD) where regular OS usage won’t hit the disk at all, and only a “Local Documents” partition is mounted writable, with nothing configured to implicitly write to it by default.
If the latter — trust me, the same is true of eMMC, or any other Flash media ordered in bulk quantities. You just have to QA them on arrival. Set up an RMAed-parts box with a shipping label in advance; you’ll need it.
> broken connectors
The microSD connector? In an educational context, that shouldn’t be end-user exposed. It’s essentially a maintenance port. Stick some tape over it.
In the computer labs of the 90s, kids would break the CD-ROM drive trays, too. MDM software was developed that would, among other things, lock out the CD-tray eject mechanism unless/until a teacher enabled it (presumably for working through some whole-class “multimedia” product that never materialized, because who’d trust kids to insert the CDs?)