I meet people that actually store things on their SD cards, like all their photos and videos they took are never on any other device

I’m flummoxed!

probably common

Either it works and you have them in a nice convenient place, or it doesn't and you don't have to worry about it anymore. It's a win win.

If you never delete anything, every memory cell is written to approximately once. That probably significantly extends the life of their cards.

Yes but they should still copy them

Yeah, the unreliability of SD cards is the main reason that I stopped using single board computers as my home server. It was extremely frustrating to have everything break when the SD card decided to stop working.

Say what you want about spinning disk drives, but in my experience they tend to be a lot more resilient than SD cards.

eMMC has been far more reliable for SBC use in my experience so far, compared to SD and microSD cards.

For example, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 has variants with different sizes of eMMC.

Also, making the rootfs read-only goes a long way. In Raspberry Pi OS you can go into the raspi-config menu and choose Performance -> Overlay, something like that to make the rootfs readonly with an overlay fs that exists in ram only. Depending on your situation it may be useful to enable this. (Anything you actually want to persist you’ll have to write to another attached storage, or send over the network to somewhere else.)

The last one I used was the Nvidia Jetson Nano. I'm sure there's a way of getting eMMC working on there, but after frying the fifth of sixth microSD card I threw my hands in the air and decided to go back to Intel.

I wonder if the NixOS tmpfs trick could be useful for something like this though...

Wonder if anyone has made a mirrored raid type device where two micro’s go into a full size