[airbreather]

Commodity SD cards - there's your problem. It's not a camera you need to buy industrial grade to get 0.5-1M write cycles.

Just bought industrial grade SD cards for Siemens PLCs the other day, almost $2k for 32 gig and due to certification for safety only good for ten years regardless of condition/use.

Equivelents spec cards without the magic S word on them are still around $800.

They are actually a different kind of memory used, so I guess not manufactured in same consumer number quantities.

I always liked the look of something like puppy Linux that loaded to ram, pretty sure most Linux variants allow this as an option, that would potentially make use of consumer grade palletable.