Yeah but it's also SD cards in particular and Raspberry Pis in particular.

"Install an OS onto boot media

To use your Raspberry Pi, you must first install (flash) an operating system (OS) onto your storage device, making it a boot device. By default, Raspberry Pi devices check for an OS on any SD card inserted into the SD card slot. Some Raspberry Pi models allow you to boot an OS from other storage devices, such as USB drives, storage connected through a HAT, and network storage. The following instructions assume that you're using a microSD card.

We recommend installing an OS to your storage device using Raspberry Pi Imager on another computer. For instructions, see ~Install using Imager. If you don't have access to another computer for writing an OS image to the storage device, you might be able to install an operating system directly on your Raspberry Pi from the internet. For instructions, see ~Install over the network."

https://web.archive.org/web/20260715154847/https://www.raspb...

What is the difference between a "recommendation" and a "default"

Here, we can see that this is a recommendation not a default

The owner must make a choice

The company has not pre-selected a default choice

It has only provided recommendations

Contrast "defaults" with "recommendations"

The former is opt-out; a choice has already been pre-selected by the company

The later is opt-in; no choice has been pre-selected, a choice must be made by the owner

The reason for this comment is that the parent cites "Raspberry Pis" instead of "the software and configuration recommended by the Raspberry Pi vendor"

The recommended software, derived from Debian,^1 and the default configuration of that software is what causes the SD card corruption, not the RPi development board

1. If I am not mistaken the OS recommendations have changed since the RPi was released, e.g., the company was originally recommending RISC OS. Challenge me on this and I'll find the reference

By "RPI owner behaviour" I mean the decision made by the RPi owner in choosing what operating system software to run and how to configure it

When I bought RPi Model B the hardware did not come with an OS pre-installed

It booted only from SD card

It was up to me to choose which OS to run. I did not choose any of the "recommended" operating systems. I was already booting other "diskless" computers using USB sticks with root mounted on tmpfs so I wanted to use that same OS for the RPi

I never experienced SD card corruption with RPi hardware

However I have experienced SD card corruption with other SBCs that had an OS pre-installed, an OS not chosen by me

By choosing to run a "recommended" OS on the RPi perhaps I would experience SD card corruption

But if that happened I would not attriubute it to the RPi. I would blame myself. And I would make different choices going forward

And when you say "due to RPi owner behaviour" what you're saying is "due to the default setup". It's a Raspberry Pi problem. The devices are notorious for this issue for good reason.

My 3 Pis have destroyed 6 SD cards. One of them also somehow drew too much power when trying to boot and got so hot it burnt me and melted itself but that could have been the power supply. I know the 4s and 5s can blow SD cards if you run them without heatsinks.

What I'm saying is, your anecdotal evidence of two pis doesn't justify saying we did something wrong with the configuration. In my experience raspberry pis still behave like "throwaway devices" but their price tags do not justify it anymore.

You suspect correctly. Embedded applications are less affected, and mounting the card r/o solves the problem completely.

I used to get Sandisk cards but recently I stopped using SD cards altogether. When it came time to update from Debian 12 to 13 for my Pi4 I migrated to an NVME USB enclosure for my boot drive. Just yesterday I set up another Pi4 for a project with an M.2 SATA enclosure and in both cases they work just fine.

> cheapest fix is an m10 optane > Costs about 20 bucks

I agree that its a good, long-lasting fix, but when was the last time you checked the pricing on those?

If you can even find any, they certainly wont be cheap nowadays!

I regret selling mine

Doesn't actually help. It eventually goes corrupt anyway. It might be related to power ripple or something.

Makes it easy to replace, though.

Yeah that's more or less my goal for the setup in the post... I didn't have much time to investigate what else I could move off of the SD card but I suspect there's a few other things I could do. NixOS makes it super easy too.

Ho-ho my friend! You want to buy storage for your computer before 2030? I'm so sorry, but you now pay big time, now you sell your car for one nvme drive.

Somebody set up us the bomb.

I discovered that barely-used enterprise Intel SSDs (DC S3610, S3700, S3710) were cheap on ebay a year or so ago and I may have bought a few dozen. These things have remaining endurance measured in petabytes. Sure, it’s overkill to have a 200GB enterprise SATA disk as the boot volume for a Raspberry Pi, but this is exactly my kind of overkill.

Really would just prefer a working, non-buggy, Pi2 maybe without all the crazy extra power + compute + RAM. Or at least have the option, because $20 is more my style for a lot of these tasks, not $150CDN.