Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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I don't disagree with you, but the other perennial unanswered question on HN is: how do I ensure I'm paying extra for actual quality and not just sucker tax?

Memory cards and ssds are famously obtuse like this. There are the branded versions (custom made for your Switch, for your Xbox,etc) which are exactly the same as their cheaper counterparts. Sandisk itself recently started a "creator" line of cards and ssds which are, again, exactly the same but more expensive. Samsung had Evo Plus which was different than Evo+ but same as Evo Select. Go figure!

Sometimes looking at specs helps but usually not - I.e. The "up to" speed marks are famously irrelevant for real time usage, and brand name companies will offer any number of cards with same specs and tags (u2/v3/class10/mark5/whatever) at varying price points. And then there's the WD Red saga where drives branded "NAS" were completely inappropriate for NAS usage.

I ran a photography business a while back and always bought extreme pro because I just couldn't risk it, but honestly, I felt like a bit of a sucker. It's hard to know when you're actually buying real quality and endurance increase.

Looking for the most "extreme" high-quality micro-sd cards on Amazon, and also on B&H to avoid the chance of counterfeits, I'm struck by how they are all so damn cheap. Whether SanDisk Ultra, Extreme, Extreme Plus, Extreme Pro, or Max Endurance, the 64GB card is less than $20. (I've seen reports of Sandisk Extreme micro-sd cards dying, at close to the "typical raspi" rate ... I haven't seen that yet for Max Endurance, and that does sound like what I want, so I got one and I'm trying it. But it bothered me, ironically, that it's pretty much the same price.)

Meanwhile, if you go to a professional electronics component vendor like Mouser or Newark, a SwissBit "pseudo-SLC" micro-sd card is over $50 for 32 GB. I'm pretty sure that is real industrial usage quality, and will have similar longevity to a "real SSD" of similar size. (I also got one of these, it works well so far, but that's not a conclusive test yet :)

I guess I could instead get the 512 GB "Sandisk Extreme" whatever, and the additional size will probably give similar longevity? It just seems silly, and a bit less of a sure thing, than the priced-as-expected industrial thing. It is kinda strange/annoying that in the consumer side of the market, they keep adding superlatives, but it seems like the same cheap flash for the same cheap price? The real stuff surely costs more than $16, but it's not on the consumer market, at all.

And why doesn't the Raspi foundation/company sell some of the high-priced industrial stuff, just to make it an obvious option, even if not for most people? If you're just messing around and learning, use the cheap one, but if you want a raspi to do real work for more than 4 months straight, you're gonna want one of these real industrial SD cards. I guess most people who care about storage use m.2 adapters, which you might want for the performance, or the better pricing at higher capacity. But if you don't need the performance or capacity, or don't have room for the m.2 in your application, and just need the damn thing to not break ... the real "extreme" does exist, it is the SwissBit.

Kingston Industrial pSLC are less than 30 € for 32 GB.

I feel like the DWPD should be given with at least 2 significant digits, and must be based on real world testing to find the amount of writes that 99.9% of the cards can take for the duration of their warranty without failing before warranty ends.

> how do I ensure I'm paying extra for actual quality and not just sucker tax?

Objectively? You can't. You can make sure you don't get a counterfeit by never buying on amazon or ebay. And you can test things like the write speed are as claimed.

But to actually measure the longevity of a card? You've got to buy a load of them, use them intensively in realistic conditions, and carefully investigate every failure to produce statistics.

You can get plenty of anecdotes from DIYers, but let me tell you: My headless Raspberry Pi doesn't show up on the network? Could be a failed microsd card. Could be the disk's full so some log is blocking on a write. Could be a bad software update. Could be I powered it off mid-software-update. Could be weak wifi. Could be I brought a counterfeit microsd. Could be something I plugged into the GPIO. Could be a barely adequate power supply. Could be I messed up a setting and now the DHCP or the SSH server isn't working right. Could be it getting recruited into a botnet. Could be it changing IP addresses and me trying to connect to the old one. Are you going to take my word for it when I say it was the microsd card for sure?

I'm exactly with you - with the added Complication that when somebody does endurance testing (e.g. Backblaze), by then a) manufacturer started using different components for that SKU, and / or manufacturers no longer produce those SKUs. Almost by definition, you can only see endurance when it's too late (see the ibm desk star saga).

Bottom line, you can try to trust the manufacturer reputation, purchase channel, and price points / specs, but you can never be sure - so backup like crazy :-)

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