The Western Digital Purple have wear leveling listed in the specification and are considered good cards...
...Someone checked up and got some extra info from their engineering team:
Reddit thread
Thats actually a thread I participated in some time back, and it includes the issue I mentioned 2 posts back where manufacturers have no idea what they are selling...
From that thread...
EDIT: I reached out to WD and asked for further information on the wear-leveling feature of their cards. This was their (confusing) response:
Unfortunately, our WD Purple micro SD doesn’t support natively a WL feature, nor dynamic or static. We cannot recommend you use this product to install an operating system despite of its durability, reliability and performance.
And this is the exact issue i was referencing a few posts up about manufacturers not being helpful.
My specific experience was with Sandisk, but it's frighteningly identical to the reply the user in that reddit thread got.
Add to that Sandisk being acquired by WD... possibly not a co-incidence i got a near copy/past of that reddit threads WD enquiry.
That thread goes on to say that Sandisk do not have wear leveling, yet Sandisk said over 10 years ago:
Seems to me that most people who make statements on this do not know what they are talking about!
Something I'm already too well aware of.
--WD datasheet says wear leveling, WD rep says no, has no kind of wear leveling.
--Sandisk says all our products have it, and then they say not.
Who to believe???
I cannot find Sandisk industrial cards available, so that rules them out.
And add to that 6 out of my last 10 Sandisk cards failed with light use within 6 to 24 months.
I once only purchased Sandisk product, starting with CF cards back in the day.
I now only use Samsung flash (and no risk of counterfeits either! Samsungs own store sells them very cheaply!)
Ultimately, I'm still after a uSD card i can run an OS from with at least a hope of long term reliability.
Not so much worried about the price, but would love to keep the implementation simple.
Can go dedicated mSATA SSD route but prefer not to kill the Pi form factor and choice of cases with the additional bulk.
Happy to pay a reasonable premium.
I'd love to get hands on some new manufacture of MLC cards in the 8GB - 32GB range.
I expect to pay the equivelent of a Samsung Pro Endurance 64-128 GB price bracket for the luxury if these things can be found retail.
yep the Western Digital cards are good, we use them, a bit dearer than their SanDisk equivalents, SanDisk have wear leveling on their Industrial cards but prices are around triple what the High Endurance cards cost so not a viable option
Whilst as mentioned above I don't have a lot of favour for Sandisk I'd gladly pay triple for such a feature.
If only I could get my hands on it.
My scenario is not that of cyclic use, but rather only a small portion of the card being used at any given time.
You're not by chance able to direct me to where I could obtain such a card?