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by _ikke_ 2171 days ago
I've had 2 sd-cards go corrupt (read-only, any writes were lost). Had a mariadb instance running on it as well. It will hold for for some time, but eventually, the card will give up.
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Oh no! What will you recommend as a long term solution? I have ordered a Pi 4, should I use an USB Flash Drive / HDD / SATA SSD?
The advice is to buy a quality SD card and backup data that shouldn't be lost to a more reliable location. S3 bucket, a local NAS or something like that. The general idea with Pi's and IoT devices is to act more as input point for data or programmable controllers rather than reliable networked storage or server space.

also Pi4 now supports boot from USB: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb

Since the Pi4 can boot from USB now (might still be in beta, not sure if it's fully released), I would get a USB3 to M.2 adapter, buy a decent M.2 drive, and use that. It'll take up more space than the SD card, obviously, but not that much more.
You can even get SSD based USB sticks like the Sandisk Extreme Pro 3.1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N7QDO7M

I bought one to run Windows on my Retina MacBook Pro. I only need Windows for gaming when visiting friends, and it works flawlessly for that purpose.

You can use a USB hard drive and just save to it while still booting and running on the SD.

Check speeds when you get it to see what works for you best.

Honestly throw the thing in a bin and use an old mini pc instead. Lenovo thinkcentre tiny. You can pick them up on eBay for about the same as a fully equipped pi.

Pi is 100% not suitable for 100% duty work. It’s just a toy.

As someone who's been running a media server and home automation server on his Pi 24/7 for 3 years now, I beg to differ.
I’ve had 6 so far and all have had reliability issues or weirdness. Mostly related to SD corruption, crashing or power brown out. The power issue was not solved by running them off a proper keysight bench supply.

SD cards are quite frankly horrible boot media as well.

That's 27W (idle), compared to the Pi 4's 3.4W (idle).

That's an additional 145kg of CO₂ per year (2018 US average).

M600 fanless is around 15W full whack and 5.5W idle (measured). The CPU in it has a 4W TDP.

For that you gain:

Decent thermal design., A decent quality enclosure, A power supply (thinkpad brick), Two displayport holes, An SATA interface (M.2 form) for an SSD, Built in Wifi, A RAM slot you can chuck 16Gb in, 2 more USB ports.

There's no competition. I paid 79 GBP each for mine (I own 3). Pi is 57 GBP bare board.

Pictures. Mac mini for scale: https://imgur.com/a/jXjLusb

And on CO2, perhaps you should just do without it if it's a problem.