On 19 Nov 2014 23:54, "Tom Ivar Helbekkmo" <tih@hamartun.priv.no> wrote:
> Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com> writes:
>
> > After a bit less than a year, the SD card suffered a catastrophic
> > failure.  When I say catastrophic, I mean I can't find any meaningful
> > data anywhere in the first 120MB or so of /dev/sdM0/data ... just
> > not-quite-random looking garbage.
>
> Could have been just the normal "SD card used up" situation.  They don't
> last forever, and to get a reasonable life time you have to a) not buy
> too cheap, and b) not write to it more than you have to.  Under Unix,
> point b means mounting with noatime and nodiratime options.
>
> Some specifics here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling

Raspi in particular also seems to be very sensitive to power quality. Often
the symptom of overloaded power supply is a crash and an unbootable SD card.

Frequent backups of the card are probably a good idea in any case.