[fookyong]

as someone who might be using the Pi in a somewhat high-availability environment pretty soon, this frightens me!

What do you think is the main variable here - SD card quality? amount of I/O? or is it simply that the Pi is not meant for high availability?

If the answer leans to the latter, what other choices are there? My goals is to find a small computer (very small) that has reliable uptime and can do 1080p video.

[gambiting]

Actual SSDs have multiple memory chips in them, and not only they spread writes between them, they do actual wear leveling, so once certain cells become unwritable they are marked as such and the controller starts using cells from the reserved area(which can be few or even several gigabytes on larger drives). SD cards on the other hand have only one chip, and although they have a controller that monitors the wear level, they have an extremely limited number of spare cells, so it's very easy to kill an SD card by repeatedly writing to the same address.

As others have mentioned - you could solve this by serving the content from a USB drive, but because Ethernet and USB share a bus, you will essentially halve the speed of each, which is not ideal. If you have the money to spend, I would recommend a different board, but with a dedicated SATA port, so you can use an actual SSD or a regular hard drive for serving content. So....TK1? https://developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1

[jononor]

Some friends working with installations have said that power outtages kills SD cards very quickly with RPi, and that changing to a BeagleBone Black improved things.

Another alternative is https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-...