[ajford]

What cards are you using?

I have three RPis in abusive conditions, and they haven't had a single SD card issue. Two RPi 3b's running as a car entertainment system, with no form of battery backup/safe shutdown. They are on the ignition power, and once the car turns off, they hard shut down. These have been in place for nearly 2 years with the same Samsung Evo 16GB cards.

The other is attached to a digital signage with less frequent hard shut downs, but still has at least one per week, and been in place since late 2017. Also running a Samsung Evo card (I think it's a 32GB since that's what I had on hand).

Both have high quality power supplies, which may help. The in-car systems have Anker car USB chargers that have been de-cased and soldered in place, while the signage one has an Anker wall charger and a standard micro-b cable.

[deepspace]

Interesting. The ones that failed were mostly Kingston. I recently switched to Samsung Evo and have not had any failures yet.

The failed ones were all running media servers with actual media storage on external drives, but indexing done on the SD card.

I ended up aggressively moving write loads to external storage and most of my RPis are running with read-only mounted SD cards these days.

[cptskippy]

What's the write cycle like? Seems like those would mostly be read only.

The cards that die quickest for me are either written excessively like a GoPro or Pi based data loggers written constantly. The GoPros are just burning out the cards but the data loggers corrupt the disk images during unexpected power loss.