Re: [LUG] Micro sd card as main drive

[Michael Everitt <michael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

    On 29/05/2022 12:32, L Smith via list wrote:

Having loaded Mint 19.3 into a micros sd card, what is the likely life expectancy of the card if laptop used on a daily basis?

Thanks

    The problem tends to come down to logging programs,
      etc which do small periodic writes, which is the enemy of most
      flash storage devices which prefer large block writes (which is
      where that type of memory storage originated, and hence most
      controllers are optimised for this workload). Ditto lots of short,
      fast, Random reads.
      
      I won't go into details of pro's and con's of SD-card type
      storage, as this has already been written about a good number of
      times with regard to the Raspberry Pi (google is your friend!) ..
      but I know that Armbian (for example), being an embedded-optimised
      variant of Debian for ARM devices, has some quite nifty
      tmpfs-backed storage to reduce the 'wear' on the memory card from
      these small-"frequent" writes, and batch them up for a
      larger/slower pattern.
      
      A reasonably quick overview of performance metrics can be gleaned
      from the wikipedia article at
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#Class . TL;DR - the more
      expensive the card - independent of capacity - the better
      longevity you will get. There are also 'high endurance' cards
      coming onto the market which are more favoured to 'heavy-duty'
      use, although whether this is more for sustained read/write used
      in eg. dashcams, etc vs. "application" use I couldn't honestly
      say!
      
      Regards,
      Michael/veremitz.

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