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I switched to Samsung from SanDisk about 7-8 years ago (when I first discovered this cheating on one of my SanDisk USB sticks) and haven't had any issues.

BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic.

For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily.

Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.



About two decades ago, there was a nice article about a hierarchy of memory cards. The chips are binned:

- Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products

- Defective chips have the defective parts disabled, and were placed in products on tier down. A 16MB chip might be sold as an 8MB.

- Unreliable chips were given various error correcting techniques, and are placed in cheap, off-brand parts, as well as non-critical applications (such as, at the time, answering machines). A common technique was to scatter addresses, so errors were randomly distributed. For answering machines, this meant a little bit of static. For other applications, this meant a bit of ECC would make them quasi-reliable.

Cards and chips down the line failed a lot more than at the top.

I have had a few memory cards fail before. I am glad to pay for top-line parts. The premium I'm willing to pay is in the low tens of dollars, which is what Sandisk used to do.


> there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi

I found non-A1/A2 cards to be significantly slower, so these days I ensure they're at least A1 rated.




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