I was using a pi 3 with a heatsink in the official case to play a h265 movie (which will be software decoded on a pi3). After about 10 minutes I noticed it started dropping frames and it displayed the thermometer symbol in the top-right of the display.
When I removed the top lid from the case, the temperature dropped enough for the thermometer icon to disappear and playback to continue smoothly.
You can mitigate this somewhat with https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
With some finagling you can get them to boot an OS from an external disk then your SD card can just hold a read-only boot loader.
I couldn't find a good source that quantifies the effect, but this mentions it: https://www.atpinc.com/blog/ssd-data-retention-temperature-t...
This is why you have to unmount USB drives, if you pull the drive while data is still in cache would also create problems. The difference is when copying files to the drives, it's sequential, you may lose a file or two. When it's the OS using it as the main drive there are loads of write operations going on.
At least it's easier to add battery backup to a Pi then most other computers.
Well I lost some to power failure, and they all had ext4 on it. Anecdotal I know, but I'll be avoiding RPi for anything that needs to persist data in the future.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/warn...
Works for me, all my little media boxes run happily with them, despite running 24/7.
(I don't have any monetary interest in flirc, I'm just another happy pi3 flirc case owner)
It's just a lot of work, and either Broadcom hasn't done it, or they don't want to license it to the Raspberry Pi.
(I'm just running Hassio, so can't really speak to its thermal effectiveness myself. But it's got enough weight to keep cables from pulling it off my shelf.)
Seems to run fine, it's never overheated or throttled for me.