"Areligious Republican"  wrote in message
news:qopid6$tk3$1@dont-email.me...
> I read somewhere (forgotten where) yesterday that the SD card in a
> RPi malfunctions because log files (which nobody reads anyway)
> wear out the write count on the card and so one has to keep
> a stock of SD cards to hands with the OS already on.
>
> How true is this?6

I've had my Pi 3B+ with a fairly bog-standard Sandisk card running for about
18 months. In addition to normal OS usage, there's also data being written
every few seconds. That's worked fine. I only had one failure to boot, after
a graceful shutdown, when something became corrupted. I reformatted the card
and CHKDSKed it (as FAT32) and no faults were found. Having copied NOOBS
onto it and installed Raspbian again and set everything up again, the card
is still in use. However every month or so I shut the Pi down, and take a
new disc image in case I need to restore the Pi to its initial state (ie
factory build of Raspbian with all my later mods and installations of
packages). I've never (yet!) had to rely on one of those safety disk images,
but at least I'd be up and running a bit quicker than if I had to reinstall
from scratch.

I *could* have used the SD card for writing large video files from the PVR
software that I use, but I decided to write those to a USB spinning disk
rather than to SD, partly to reduce the large number of writes and partly
because I didn't want to fill up 32 GB very quickly.

Over the past few months there have been a lot of non-graceful shutdowns due
to power glitches (crap mains supply to the village) and the Pi has always
been up and running again within a couple of minutes. If things don't
improve, I may need to get a UPS to drive the Pi and router, to cover
2-second outages which are just long enough to make everything reboot. I
think only once has there been a longer break than a couple of seconds, and
that was about 10 minutes: long enough for me to start feeling my way
through an unfamiliar house (we'd only moved in a couple of weeks earlier)
in the pitch black to the bedroom where I knew there was a torch.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05