My first go around with the original Pi, I ended up burning out two micro SD cards in short order. The solution at the time was to mount the file systems read-only and put /tmp in RAM and do without swap (if I recall correctly). For my purposes this worked out fine, since the Pi was being used as a signage kiosk. Later I retired the original Pi and bought the series 3. I bought a much higher quality card, based on a similar performance and longevity article. Maybe something changed between versions of Pi, or maybe these cards really are better, but I haven't had the problem reoccur even with a read/write filesystem.