Reliable SD cards

[Gary Mikitin, AF8A]

From time to time, the subject of SD card failures comes up.  I recall hearing/talking about it at last weekend's Workshop.

One of the attendees generously shared his (industrial) experience with me in an email after the event (I didn't ask him for permission to share his name, so this is from 'anonymous'). - 73 - Gary

The industrial ssd grade vendor I could not remember last Saturday was Amtron in Ca

After initial failures of ordinary ssd cards in CompactFlash and CFast and MicroSD packages back around 2015, I changed the ssd cards in my employer's embedded system to be SLC from Amtron. Brand names were either Amtron or Apro

SLC has the highest lifetime but costly and sometimes long delivery, so later added industrial grade MLC from vendors Transcend and Innodisk.

Until my retirement in 2023 there were no further ssd failures reported from ssd of the above 3 vendors. Now there are many more vendors offering Industrial grade MLC.

Here is a link to Amtron microSD. https://www.amtron.com/micro_sd_card.htm

This link is useful: https://industrial.adata.com/us/edm/TBW_SSD

Most ssd have the SMART reporting system with status reported via bios on boot.
Today I searched for SMART diagnostics and found on linux " smartctl " ( pre installed) and nvme-cli ( to be installed). I presume similar will be available on Win.

Here are extracts for smartctl -a /dev/sda  on a Innodisk CFast 64GB in a computer almost continuously logging wxjt-x since about 2022.

163 Total_Bad_Block_Count   0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age Offline      -       14
168 SATA_PHY_Error_Count    0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age Offline      -       0
169 Remaining_Lifetime_Perc 0x0000   088   000   000    Old_age Offline      -       88

You could run these diagnostic utilities on a used data log  micro ssd card in a USB adaptor plugged to a computer. That could tell the TBW rating needed for your lifetime