Thanks for sharing your experience. Totally get your frustration—once you’ve fried a few cards in drones or SBCs, it’s hard to trust them again.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that desktop 3D printers like the A1 Mini live a much easier life than drones or outdoor SBCs. They’re not getting shaken around in flight, exposed to the elements, or constantly powered on/off. So the failure mode isn’t necessarily the same.
But it also sounds like you’re throwing out the whole SD tech based on a few rough use cases. I’ve worked on a bunch of industrial systems—stuff mounted on planes, oil rigs, and other brutal environments—and we’ve had success with SD cards, if you use the right ones and treat them properly.
Here’s what’s worked for us:
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Use high-endurance cards from reputable brands.
I’ve had good results with SanDisk Extreme Pro, and also with Panasonic-branded industrial cards (which I suspect are just rebranded SanDisks). Here’s a specific model I’ve used that holds up well:
32GB SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC™ UHS-I CARD | Sandisk
We also implement health monitoring where supported, and pull the card once it drops below 98% health. -
Physically secure the card.
One trick we use is electrical-grade RTV silicone. It’s not elegant, but if you want to stop vibration or contact issues, nothing beats gluing the card into place. Just don’t expect easy service later. Here’s a good thread on that:
Silicone glue - #2 by Olias
Also worth noting: we avoid spring-loaded card slots whenever possible, because even those can cause flaky contacts under the wrong conditions.
Obviously your use case is different, but if you’re bricking cards left and right, it may be less about SD cards being inherently bad and more about needing higher-grade components and better mechanical support. YMMV of course, but this approach has drastically cut down on our field failures.