I hear it in every discussion, yet I'm still waiting for any of my SD cards to fail. I've had the same rpi0 for 3 years as CCTV with motiond (motion detector). Recording all activity from my window, filling the card in 100% and removing all recorded data, every 2 days, no errors, no failure. I no longer need that CCTV so using the rpi, with the same SD card, as IPFS node.

IME, the people who complain about SD cards failing on raspberry pi bought cheap cards that were intended for bulk storage, not frequent writes or running an OS card. Regular SD cards are not SSDs.

On my network of random Pis and other stuff, I use only high-endurance SD cards which can withstand lots of writes have durability much closer to SSDs.

Here’s from someone who only bought the supposedly highest recommended ones and had several failures before I switched to usb. Maybe roughly average 10-20% failure/ year uptime for something that has heavy log writing?

A thing people tend to forget is temperature. Keep them cool and they have higher chances of surviving longer.

Yes, that's correct. I only buy original Samsung or SanDisk SD cards that come with 5+ years warranty, and then I keep original packaging anyway.

If it works it works :)

I just had it happen so I figured I'd bring it up just in case.

Use external USB SSD (what I did for a mail server). One could also be very aggressive with making the kernel lazy about flushing to SD card. (It has downsides, but if you put a UPS shield on, it's a pretty neat hack.)