This I never understood. I have 3 different RPis running since they were available to buy. A 2, a 3 and a 4. All with the OS on microSD and no optimisation like writing log files to tmpfs or similar. It’s plain Ubuntu Server for ARM.
And in all these years, I had maybe one microSD going read-only on me. Cloned that to a fresh one, did an fsck and the Pi was up and running again. That’s it. No other issues despite various sudden power losses etc.
I don’t understand where these rumours about bad reliability of SD cards in Pis come from.
Pi 1 a/b were really fragile but since pi 2 this problem is mostly solved. Still if I need to write a lot I would use a external drive.
We have >300 pies running 24/7 on 52 sites all over the world.
Even though we use no name brand microSDs we had only 2 failures because of a broken SD card in 4 years.
Our partner company was using our hardware as a basis for something. After 1 month they asked us what SD cards brand we were using because they had a high failure rate. Our secret. We use a self made distro with minimal writes, they used default raspian and were writing permanently to the SD card.
I've always used noatime for filesystem, journald set to ram logging, etc. Usually everything seems fine until a reboot triggers a fsck. Most were ext 3/4 filesystems.
And in all these years, I had maybe one microSD going read-only on me. Cloned that to a fresh one, did an fsck and the Pi was up and running again. That’s it. No other issues despite various sudden power losses etc.
I don’t understand where these rumours about bad reliability of SD cards in Pis come from.