The used to be premium? Or at least I considered them to be. TIL. Who is a good premium brand today?
BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic.
For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily.
Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.
- Reliable chips were placed in name-brand products
- Defective chips have the defective parts disabled, and were placed in products on tier down. A 16MB chip might be sold as an 8MB.
- Unreliable chips were given various error correcting techniques, and are placed in cheap, off-brand parts, as well as non-critical applications (such as, at the time, answering machines). A common technique was to scatter addresses, so errors were randomly distributed. For answering machines, this meant a little bit of static. For other applications, this meant a bit of ECC would make them quasi-reliable.
Cards and chips down the line failed a lot more than at the top.
I have had a few memory cards fail before. I am glad to pay for top-line parts. The premium I'm willing to pay is in the low tens of dollars, which is what Sandisk used to do.
I found non-A1/A2 cards to be significantly slower, so these days I ensure they're at least A1 rated.
You might also look specifically for "Windows To Go Certified" flash drives - not because you're actually going to run Windows from them but because they should meet some decent minimums for speed and flash endurance.