"Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes."

This is not specific to RPis. When an SD card is subjected to "unpredictable" writes it creates potential risk of corruption. The writes are triggered by software, not the RPi hardware

There is no rule that says the RPi user must mount the root filesystem r/w on the card. It can be mounted r/w on mfs or tmpfs, for example, and the card can be removed after boot. Been doing this since 2012

Zero writes to the card, no corruption

It's true these corruption issues are "notorious" but that's due to RPi owner behaviour, not the RPI hardware

"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.