I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
I used to think so too, but my pi-hole just died the other week after four years of uptime. Couldn’t work it out, finally pulled the SD card out to reinstall the OS and found my laptop wouldn’t recognise it.
Made me glad I don’t run my mailserver on a Pi anymore!
I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
I have a high fail rate with Samsung SD cards. Oddly the cheap-o no name ones haven’t failed yet.
I used to think so too, but my pi-hole just died the other week after four years of uptime. Couldn’t work it out, finally pulled the SD card out to reinstall the OS and found my laptop wouldn’t recognise it.
Made me glad I don’t run my mailserver on a Pi anymore!
I join you, I used to change SD card and USB disk every 1-2 year. I bought a nas 3 year ago didn’t need to change disk yet.