It seems that the only think that is lacking on RPi is flash memory storage. Most smartphones have a lot of it, and it seems that 1GB of storage would be enough for the RPi and would not necessarily be so expensive.
They are typically marketed toward video surveillance systems and dash cams. I'm not sure how the rest of a Raspberry Pi's performance would be effective.
Also eMMC chips are no magic. There are crappy ones and good ones. Guess which ones you're going to get for little money?
I have not had any problems when using a reliable power supply. I'm guessing the 'endurance' or 'industrial' cards some people claim are lifesavers are just doing something to guard against flaky power input when doing reads and writes, so it masks the issue.
My most recent additions are a Samsung Evo card and a Samsung Endurance. I am curious to see which dies first.
(Or actually even supported, IIRC)
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
Hopefully that will get fixed soon.
Enough for what? A typical Raspbian install not takes a bit more than 4GB. I don't think that the Lite version (no GUI or applications) would fit either. I'd suggest 8GB, if that's a convenient size. As flash density increases, more and more goes on a single chip and that's where production is going. Consider the price of SD cards or USB sticks. Below about 16 or 32GB they don't get much cheaper and I suspect is is for this reason.
And IAC, the RPi foundation is working hard to keep the price of the board at $35US so adding something like this probably means something else would have to be eliminated.
Most consumer cards are designed around media storage so they don't last as long.
FWIW I have several Pis running 24x7 and have not had a single SD card failure. I usually buy high end cards but I also buy cheap cards (4GB cards)and a few Micro-Center house brand, for which I don't know the quality.
I've had one that has been running years, I think. Drives a monitor, looping a video where my wife works.
The only SD card failure I have experiences was in a camera.
Early iterations of the RPi boards apparently had some bad design choices in the power circuitry, which makes the problem worse.
I have three RPis in abusive conditions, and they haven't had a single SD card issue. Two RPi 3b's running as a car entertainment system, with no form of battery backup/safe shutdown. They are on the ignition power, and once the car turns off, they hard shut down. These have been in place for nearly 2 years with the same Samsung Evo 16GB cards.
The other is attached to a digital signage with less frequent hard shut downs, but still has at least one per week, and been in place since late 2017. Also running a Samsung Evo card (I think it's a 32GB since that's what I had on hand).
Both have high quality power supplies, which may help. The in-car systems have Anker car USB chargers that have been de-cased and soldered in place, while the signage one has an Anker wall charger and a standard micro-b cable.
The failed ones were all running media servers with actual media storage on external drives, but indexing done on the SD card.
I ended up aggressively moving write loads to external storage and most of my RPis are running with read-only mounted SD cards these days.
The cards that die quickest for me are either written excessively like a GoPro or Pi based data loggers written constantly. The GoPros are just burning out the cards but the data loggers corrupt the disk images during unexpected power loss.