[gmazza]

This was mostly from a personal experience of running couple of dozens Raspberry Pies. To elaborate:

- Cheap cards would start corrupting right in the middle of first "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade";

- SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB fared much better, but still we had several failures after half-a-year;

- Failure mode in both cases - corruption in superblocks and inodes, journal doesn't help much when recovering (we use ext4).

As a result, we settled on splitting each card into two root partitions - active and standby. To upgrade, overwrite standby one with dd, switch active/standby by editing /boot/cmdline.txt, and reboot.

[sangnoir]

I have had half a dozen SD cards fail (corrupted) on my RPi in a 4 month period - but it turned out to be caused by anaemic power supply. I never got a corrupted SD card since I got a 2.5 Amp adaptor - this was 18 months ago with the very same RPi.

[TickleSteve]

Quite often with the RPi, the problem is more failed-to-shutdown than FLASH-failure.

People unplug those things without shutting them down correctly.... quite possibly that was the problem, nothing inherent to FLASH or SD cards.