Conversely the only Samsung microSD card I ever had failed on me. I've also had some trouble with SanDisk cards from time to time. My general experience is that microSD cards are okay but I'm not at all happy about them.

I'm doing a project soon involving a Raspberry Pi. I've used rpi for various things before but the different thins time is that it's going to be installed at the location of a client. I am quite nervous that the microSD card will fail. For my own stuff I can easily write the image to a new card and it doesn't matter. But with a client where they expect the thing I'm making to work it would be painful to have it fail.

Is there some ready-made Linux distro for Raspberry Pi that is extremely small in size and which is made to load it whole self into memory and not write back to the SD card at all? It'd be extremely helpful to know about it if any such distro exists. Preferably it should be based on Rasbian just slimmed down and with logging etc removed. That way the kernel itself would be more reliable so that it won't crash randomly for reasons that have otherwise been fixed in Raspbian but which might not be in an independently maintained kernel.