On a sunny day (Sat, 31 Mar 2018 12:42:00 +0100) it happened druck
 wrote in :

>On 30/03/2018 10:42, A. Dumas wrote:
>> On 30/03/2018 10:49, Newdo wrote:
>>> i am thinking about installing raspbian on an ext3 formatted USB stick
>>> on order to get rid of the file system journaling accessing the device
>>> too often..
>>
>> Well, a USB stick is the same sort of flash media as an SD card, so you
>> won't solve that problem. I use a spinning disk for my server Pi, it's a
>> 2.5" portable disk powered by the USB port, max_usb_current=1 in
>> /boot/config.txt. Works well, haven't had an outage in years.
>
>Some USB sticks, particularly the tiny low profile ones, may be pretty
>much the same as an SD card when used as a Pi filing system. Some of the
>larger sticks *may* have better controllers for improved wear levelling
>and resilience when used as a Pi filing system.
>
>I've been using a Samsung USB3 bar drive on one of my Pi's for over 3
>years without a problem, where as the maximum an SD card has lasted is
>18 months. My main Pi is using a proper SSD with a USB to SATA adaptor.

I think it depends a lot on the application.
One of my old Pies that drives a big wall-clock and uses some - I don't who
made it - old SDcard

http://panteltje.com/panteltje/raspberry_pi_FDS132_matrix_display_driver/index.
html
has been running about 18 hours a day from 2013.

As it does not normally write data that is logical I think.
An other pi here is from 2014 and runs 24/7 and does a lot of logging to a
normal 16 GB SDcard,
writes every few seconds.
So where does that leave us?

Important is backups.
I just dd the SDcards every now and then, mostly after I made changes, to a big
harddisk.

So, compared to the lifetime of modern electronic devices... those FLASH
memories are not so bad.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05