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

In this video, I share my journey with microSD cards for my Raspberry Pi. I started with standard consumer cards that kept failing. Frustrated, I discovered industrial-grade options like ATP. They are pricier but offer reliability when you need it most. 5/7 would recommend.

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Video gear I use to make these videos:

Audio Gear:

[quiteenough]

5 million hours is roughly 570.7 years, if anyone wonders

[SecretMoose]

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.

[jetseverschuren]

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

[Amadbdullah]

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 👍🏻

[metalmikecode]

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.

[serifini]

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.

[hunterzyph]

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

[repatch]

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

[ShinyTechThings]

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

[leuvadhaval]

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.

[jerrywright]

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.

[roysigurdkarlsbakk]

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.

[Arek_R.]

RPis are not really suitable for mission critical stuff, and once start adding to the cos by buying more expensive parts that plug into/onto it like fancy sd cards or m.2 hats with ssds, you're better of buying some old office mini pc from dell hp or lenovo (size of a book).
Those you can buy used for under 100 euro and will come with 8GB of RAM, few times faster CPU than what RPi5 has got, and a lot of these come with SSDs.

[clins]

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

[perditaolio]

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

[smoetje]

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...

[johnlaurencepoole]

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.

[solidsnake]

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.

[Corialtavi]

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

[JazzTechie]

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