Since most Single-Board Computers ship without any SSDs, eMMC modules, or boot drives, it falls upon you to pick the ideal storage accessory for your project-making companion. Modern tinkering boards rely primarily on microSD cards for housing everything from the OS files to project data, so these tiny cards are deeply intertwined with the SBC ecosystem.

But with SBC hardware getting better with each passing year, microSD cards are no longer ideal for your experiments – to the point where even premium cards can end up bottlenecking the average Raspberry Pi. The problem? Despite knowing about the drawbacks of microSD cards in SBC projects, their inherent advantages make it hard for me to rely entirely on SSDs, hard drives, and other storage media for SBC experiments.

MicroSD cards have limited write cycles

They’re far less durable than an SSD

Let’s say you’ve built a complex project with your Raspberry Pi. The last thing you’d want is for a defective storage drive to reduce your hard work to nothingness. Although you can tinker with microSD cards without encountering major issues, any project that involves frequent write tasks – like the aggressive logs created by Home Assistant – will chip away at your microSD card’s lifespan. You see, these cards have a limited number of write cycles before they conk out. But since they can tolerate significantly fewer write cycles than an average SSD, you’re gambling with fate if you use microSD cards for complex projects.

I’ve been using the Raspberry Pi 5 ever since it was released in 2023. During this time, I’ve lost at least four microSD cards – and not the cheap ones, either. Since I’d use my RPi 5 to build everything from Home Assistant hubs to file-sharing servers and makeshift Network Video Recorders, I ended up subjecting my microSD cards to frequent write operations, which eventually led to their demise. Sure, there are a couple of services like Log2Ram that can reduce the impact of log generation on microSD cards. But if you’re planning to work on demanding projects, switching to SSDs (or even HDDs) can help you avoid the pain of rebuilding everything from scratch when a microSD card dies out.

Their transfer speeds and storage capacity are far from ideal

Especially for intensive projects

As if the low write endurance of microSD cards isn’t bad enough, they’re also infamous for their slow transfer speeds. Unless you go for really expensive variants, the average microSD card will have slower speeds than conventional hard drives, let alone SSDs. That may not be a problem for a casual enthusiast. But if you’re planning to use your Raspberry Pi for experiments where responsiveness is an essential metric, ditching SD cards is a sound idea. Heck, I’ve seen desktop environments that would be painfully slow on a microSD card deliver a responsive experience once I threw an SSD into the mix.

Then there’s the fact that most of the budget-friendly microSD cards tend to lie in the 8-128GB capacity range. Sure, there are options that go as high as 1TB, but you’ll have to drop a pretty penny on them – money that could otherwise be spent on an SSD that’s not only faster but also has better write endurance.

But microSD cards are pretty cheap

Making them a solid option for building projects on a budget

Unless you go for the really expensive cards, the normal capacity ones are fairly affordable – to the point where you can grab quite a few of them for well under $25. Back when I first started my descent into the Raspberry Pi rabbit hole with the RPi Zero, I didn’t have extra money I could spend on SSDs. So, 8GB and 16GB microSD cards were my tinkering companions alongside my Raspberry Pi.

If you’re on a tight budget and want to learn about computing projects, the low-end RPi units and cheap microSD cards are a solid combo. Plus, when you’re planning to conduct light experiments and aren’t that concerned about the longevity of the storage device, you can treat microSD cards as disposable boot drives for the Raspberry Pi. And if you want extra resilience and don’t care too much about the transfer speeds, some high-endurance cards tend to retail for cheaper prices than SSDs.

Their easy-to-swap nature is a godsend

No need to manage partitions on the same drive

Combine the inexpensive price tags of microSD cards with the fact that the Raspberry Pi allows you to switch them out easily, and you’ll see why I can’t bring myself to part ways with them. Let’s say I need to switch distros from Raspberry Pi OS to NixOS. If I were on an SSD, I’d either have to configure different partitions for each distribution or make peace with flashing the entire drive with NixOS.

But if I’ve got a bunch of microSD cards, I could just use my PC to flash one with NixOS and swap it with the card housing Raspberry Pi OS. Now, replace NixOS with a bunch of emulation platforms, containerization tools, and media server distros, and you’ll need to micromanage partitions like a pro on a single SSD.

SSDs for complex experiments, microSD cards for non-essential projects

Truth be told, I tend to flip between SSDs and microSD cards depending on my projects. Before I migrated my Home Assistant stack to Proxmox, I exclusively used SSDs for my Raspberry Pi-powered smart home hub. Likewise, I used an SSD as the primary drive when I recently experimented with MicroCloud to run LXCs (and even VMs) on the pint-sized board.

Although I relied on a microSD card as the boot drive, I used a hard drive to store surveillance footage when I built a Raspberry Pi-based NVR, and the same holds true for the time I installed OpenMediaVault on the SBC. But when it comes to experimenting with new distributions on the Raspberry Pi, I switch to my microSD card collection without any regrets.