The best microSD card for Raspberry Pi 5 you're NOT going to buy. 

5 million hours is roughly 570.7 years, if anyone wonders

I’ve found great success with San Disk and Samsung Pro Endurance cards. Mostly designed for dashcams they are cheap and I’ve had 5 Pi’s running for years without a single failure. As of this year I also log to ram instead and flush to the card every 5-10 seconds.

Most people also don't properly configure their Pi for best reliability. By default an OS writes a lot of data to the main disk, log files for example. By making the SD read-only, and making sure logs stay in memory, you'll make your system last a whole lot longer

Got tired of SD cards, switched to Orange PI 5 on M.2 SSD and other mini PCs and never looked back. Anyway thanks for sharing the struggle and how to overcome it 👍🏻

Having just spent far too much time RMA’ing Samsung Micro SD cards, this video is a happy find!

I was already aware of industrial grade SD cards and their advantages but couldn't easily get hold of one. I therefore used a Sandisk card in my Pi 4 server but took the precaution of running log2ram to try and avoid all those pesky small writes that seem to be the main cause of failures. So far two and a half years without a problem.

Had the same issue, replaced over 5 SD cards for my Pi-Hole and around 2 for OctoPi. Currently going strong with Kingston branded micro SD cards. Thanks for sharing, i will upgrade if necessary.

Very interesting, I too was unaware of industrial grade SD cards.

hi Tomaz, just stumbling upon your channel as I'm researching which sd card would be great to chuck in my raspberry pi for a cheeky home server. thanks for the enlightening video. would you recommend other non-industrial-grade sd cards that would be more reliable than sandisk ones? =x i'm gonna buy a sandisk one lol

Thank you for sharing. I will pass your ideas to my non-believer friends. It is good to know that industrial-strength SD cards are available.

If you installed Armbian on a standard SD card, or if you setup overlayfs with a standard raspberry pi OS install, it should last way longer. The former uses a lot of hacks to put whatever's writable on RAM disks, typically variants of tmpfs. The latter does something like it - mirror the existing install to a whole ramdisk, but then making upgrades a bit harder.

FWIW, while the industrial spec cards are the epitome, ‘high endurance’ cards aren’t that far off and are far more affordable

I use cheap Sandisk microSD card in my Rpi4bs and I never had a problem. Also I use pihole, Kodi...and no problem with the cards. They are in use for at least 3 years...bought on Aliexpress.

The life extending practice I use is log2ram which has log files written to ram and only written to disk on clean shutdown. I don't care if it loses the logs in a crash so that's not an issue for me. Ran a pi 24/7 for 6 years before SD failure. Of course I stated with a good SD card so low cost ones may not perform as well. Also SanDisk makes high endurance cards which get good reviews for life time writes. The reviewer thinks it has 2 level recording instead of the tri level typical in other SD cards. However, this is no documentation on number of levels by the mfr.

I had 3 SanDisk 64GB Ultras just like the one photographed on your video fail in a Gentoo Linux image using the btrfs ("better") file system. The disk simply locked up and became read-only. I posted to the btrfs DEV mailing list and complained and quickly got a response from a lead architect at Western Digital. I had used SanDisk 32 GB (white & gray) successfully before with no problems and I just assumed the most recent release would be better. When 3 of the disks exhibited the same failures in the same amount of time, I knew this was not just an exception. After several weeks, SanDisk replaced 5 of my disks with later models of 128 GB (which I did not need) stating the 64 GB model was no longer available. I suspect that "batch", e.g. the 64 GB, had problems and has been withdrawn from commerce. You and I shared the dismay of encountering a bad batch. Lessons learned: newer is not necessarily better or reliable. For mission critical applications, e.g. 24/7 server, stick with proven SDs from reliable manufacturers. Even reliable manufacturers can release problematic models.

Ah the Pi SD-Card reliability is one of those reasons that i use a flea market FritzBox with OpenWRT for these sorts of things. I'll have to figure something else out for my projects. Some ways to make most of the filesystem readonly, maybe that shall suffice to stop killing SD cards. Do SD-Cards parse FAT32/exFAT for the purpose of wear levelling, since they don't support TRIM? Maybe it makes sense to keep most of the modified files on the FAT partition?

SanDisk does make an industrial micro SD card that's 16GB.

Interesting... I did the same dns thing with a years old sd from one of my phones and a Raspi4 and it has no signs of failure at all. Maybe what you need to do is stop the logging (pihole logs a lot, that could kill the card) which is like, great for privacy too, or redirect it to a network device, somehow. I'm way too cheap so I won't get industrial cards for sure. I would've tried USB boot tho, maybe with a small ssd

I have the old Scandisk card in a digital Camera. I have one in a portable radio with MP3's of my old music library that used to be on CD's. It is still operational. As for Rasbery Pi people are going into Solid State or USB storage even M.2 Just use a Micro SD with the OS and store it somewhere safe to reinstall OS. And run OS on more stable media. Just alter boot code to make it boot via alternate location.

You can try limiting number of writes to an SD card in order to make it survive longer. That's a topic for an entire video and requires deeper OS knowledge but you could mention it.

I was extremely surprised you paid so much for a 4GB card. We use Industrial cards for years now without any issues. In our case: Kingston Industrial 32GB. They are designed with a lifetime of 1920TBW with wear-leveling, 30.000 program/erase cycles and is optimized for long life applications...

You can get 32GB industrial cards with pSLC memory for 30 bucks. I got one for my Pi 5.

Maybe a strange question: why didn't you switch over to a ssd instead of a sd-card?

The oldest SD card in my possession is a Nokia branded one that came preinstalled with a Nokia Smartphone I purchased in 2010 which is 4 GB capacity and still works today.

Regular microSD cards use bottom of the barrel flash memory, it simply won't survive regular abuse. Perhaps try one of those full size SD to microSD adapters? Those with the ribbon cable, that way you could at least use a proper sized SD card which, rumor has it, has a bit more endurance.

I’m in the process of standing up a pxe boot server as soon as some parts arive

2:05 Call me crazy but I almost think that's the best part of using an SD card for a raspberry pi. I have a pie four running open WRT right now and I just made a backup of the first fully functioning working version I got. So if the SD card in it right now fails it's literally under a minute to pull out the card and The backup in. Then when you get a second make a backup of that one and you always be ready. Heck they're so cheap get a pack of five of them have a few backups 😂

It does have lifetime warranty though... And it's made for high speed photography or videography... You need to use an sd card labeled as "High Endurance SDC"

Thank you for sharing! May I know how you like the SAMSUNG FIT Plus 3.1 USB Flash Drive as a substitute for the microSD?

At 60EUR, an ssd connected via USB makes more sense for most people. Also stopping log from constantly writing to the ssd/micro sd also helps with life span greatly.

you can do usb boot..

dudes... take the logging out of the SD card! Mostly it's only wasting writing cycles, create an external syslog server.

ive only had two scan disk mico sd die. One has been running for 4 years with PiHole on it

I've used SanDisk for photography and RPi's for years without much problems. The ones in the RPi's will die after approx 12-18 months, and it comes down to number of writes. That is just how it is.

I have a lot of Pi's running continuously for years and none have worn out cards. Most have 8 or 16 GB Sandisk. Avoid the large cards, stick with smaller ones.

is class 10 micro sd card better for use on pi5 ? i m using pi5 for product , so i expect class 10 micro sd card wouldlast longer

I need a 128gb for for my helium rak miner but i need a v30 or higher? what do set?

I've gone thru 4 cards in the last 2 weeks for my brand new pi5. Idk what im doing to it. I'll try one of these.

I am using Kingston Industrial in more than 10 raspberry pi for long time and none of them died yet :)

I mount a usb flash key and log out to that to minimize the writes to the sd, my pi-hole has been error free for three years now and counting.

I've had better experience with USB keys, though they also have issues. Good alternative is USB-to-SATA adapter and a SATA SSD, but I guess none of these are aesthetically pleasing enough to warrant a YT video. 🤪

What about WD Purple micro-SD cards? they are suitable for large/continuous load. and have a HIGH TBW

Wonder how that price compares to an SSD module for the Pi 5 🤔

Not sure why people's SD card died so often, I still have a SD card I bought when I started working

Some Years ago i also had 2 micro SD's die on me in a Pie. different brands. after that i discovered that Sandisk also has a Industrial Card with 8 GB. The only place i figured out to get it from was Ebay (mostly from china). Do not know if its the real deal, but it costs between 5-15 EUR and since then i had no problems no more... so probably you do not need to pay 60-120 EUR for such cards...

I've been using the exact same SanDisk sdcard you said it died on you twice. i have around 8 of them in raspberry pis 4 and 5, some working for 3+ years. not one died on me. 24/7 uptime on all PIs. i guess i'm lucky?

Are we supposed not to buy a perfectly good card because you've bought a bad clone or a bad unit?

The speed of the Pi5 suffer greatly with slow sd cards thou.

or you just buy a nvme with adapter for pi?

Why are you running in disk and not on ram?

I've done a similar setup compared to yours but setting the $ROOTFS to read-only and guess what? It's about to hit 6 ~5 months in and its still alive. And yes, its a very generic microsd one, bought from aliexpress.

Another solution if decide to stick with Raspberry pi, here: FINALLY! NVMe SSDs on the Raspberry Pi ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EXWu4SUsaY8.html

I decided to do not buy SanDisk after some time.

6 months back i also used a SanDisk Class 10 SD card.. corrupted and Died 😢😢

Why don't you just boot off an ssd. Argon makes a case for that.

my sandisk died 3 times, now i am on usb

Unstable power is what destroys the cards.

WTF Sandisk are very reliable and they have a lifetime warranty, been using it for over 3 years with no problems

2 years and counting? You said it was "3 months ago" Stop using AI to generate scripts for you lmao.

Laughs in F2FS. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS