Maybe a dumb question… but how many years can we expect the SD card to work ??
Mine has been online for 894 days without any reinstall apart from that that i make sure the card is not full of logfiles
https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/FlyTT14
I was thinking maybe It’s time to get a new card and clone the old one over to a new… ?
Good idea to replace 4 years old microSD card by a new one if you dont want to loose your long streak record due to un-noticed failure of old-age microSD card.
Why clone? Take advantage of using a new microSD card, and make a fresh install of LATEST Piaware image. Do you have any other software/data feeders also running on your Pi?
So Far on my Original Card. I did get a high quality micro SD card off amazon.
Longest Streak: 1157 days (2/6/2015 - 4/7/2018)
Thanks… a good idea to make a new fresh install when getting a new card 
Nothing else on the pi
There are two types of SD card failures that people will have.
1)Wear due to write cycles. This depends on how many times data was deleted from the SD card and new data stored. PiAware tries to minimize this but this happens if you change piaware-config settings, old log files are automatically deleted and new ones are written, and other misc writes. This is not too common on SD cards but it is the one people usually talk about.
If you are going with a new SD card then install the latest software is the way to go.
Not too often if you keep the writes to the SD card down to a minimum. I would say at least 6 months with normal logging/updates/cleanup/wear and tear. But if you are concerned check out a WD PiDrive. Anywhere from $15 to $30 you get 64GB to 375GB on actual hardware which wont wear out in a few months.
My PiDrive has been rock solid since they initially offered the original 314GB drive for $31.41 on a Pi Day awhile back but well over a couple years. Oh the irony of the price and size!
Install Raspbian/PiAware image.
Copy everything over but /boot to the actual hard drive.
Make a couple changes to system files.
Reboot.
???
Profit.
Decide to go that route let me know I have a post on how to do it elsewhere or actually on this forum come to think of it.
EDIT:
Just learned PiAware is tied to the software now and not the hardware. I don’t think I like that being before adding an actual Western Digital hardrive to my setup I was tossing SD cards in the trash much more often than Raspberry Pi’s…
The 64GB version of the PiDrive is a USB stick, not a hdd.
Unfortunately, wdlabs apparently will be closed, so maybe the last chance to buy Pidrives. 
It is not ready tied to the software, but to the feeder id, which can be changed. If you are changing SD cards a lot, it is a bit of a hassle, but on the image version you just need a piaware-config.txt with id, wlan, gain and copy it into boot, and you are done.
That it is… Sad to hear but any USB 3 HDD should work. Only plus to the PiDrive was cost due to the fact it was simply an external USB 3 HDD without the case and a wire that fed the RPi as well as the HDD at the same time. But external HDDs have got so cheap anyways and work the same. Guessing that’s why they abandoned the project. Just wasn’t worth buying bare bones hardware anymore.
On the plus side that’s how long HDDs have lasted for me as opposed to SD cards that I have not had to shop for a new one in awhile!
BTW:
You can change to a USB HDD from an existing SD card installation without loosing data including the software ID for your receiver. A bit of fdisk, rsync, a few commands and file edits your good to go in maybe a half hour at the most on the same code. This works on existing PiAware image as well.
https://www.swiftbyte.com/articles/raspberry-pi/running-raspbian-from-a-usb-hard-drive
… It failed after 1130 dayes…
A new fresh install was made on a new card and everything is back up and running again
It helps if the card size is way bigger than needed.
Any SD card that uses NAND memory, uses sector-virtualization techniques that are inherently somewhat wear-leveling. The spare space allocated for erase is a few % of the total capacity of the card. So buy bigger cards than needed, to make use of that.
A whitepaper that explains it better:
Also, minimize or use RAM-caching of all the log writes.
Thanks, usefull info in the link
The original 1130 days card was only 8GB but the new one is 16GB so hopefully it will work longer than the 8GB but… maybe a bit OfTopic
When I made the new installation I also wanted to make a duplicate… just in case 
So I used Linux DD and made a img file from then new installation and then used DD over to a new spare card, also 16GB but there was not enough space on the other card… funny same brand, same size but…
GParted report/show that the working installation is running on a 14,69GB card and the other is 14.57GB
So another lession learned… 16GB is not always 16GB
Actually one GB is not always one GB. Depends what are you measuring and… who you ask.
1 GB = 1000000000 bytes
1 GiB = 1073741824 bytes (linux, Windows didn’t adopt the GiB notation, so it’s still shown as GB)
Yes, SD-cards and USB-Stick tend to have a slightly different size.
Sometimes that is really annoying, I have a NAS which allows mirroring of the boot device, but the 32GB sd-card I have used is slightly bigger than all my 32GB sticks, so I either use a 64GB stick and waste a lot of space or reinstall to a usb drive and then add the sdcard as the mirror, or find out how to change partion size with bsd.
Has anyone used this tool to test integrity of microSD card?
I have just downloaded it and trying on one of my 16 Gb microSD cards, on which I can successfully write the Raspbian image, can open it’s boot folder while the card is still plugged into Windows computer, and added files ssh and wpa_supplicant.conf. When slipped into RPi 4, it would start booting, then after few seconds stops. Cannot SSH either using WiFi or Wired connection.
Yes, where you been? LOL J/K. It is the best tool out there for SD card testing IMHO. Sounds like yours is on it’s way out. Sometimes they will appear as though they are being written to, but doesn’t happen. Put the SD card through a partition tool of your choice - does it repartition as it should? (even if it says it does, is the card actually blanked when pull/push?) I’ve had quite a few cards fail in this way for some reason and I always buy quality cards (Samsung EVO). The ssh file probably didn’t even stick.
Thanks for confirmation. I never knew or heard about it. Only today Google search brought this tool to me. I liked it when I used it. “Love at first sight” Thought let others also benefit from it and posted about it.
When I slip into Pi and boot, every other newly written microSD card runs for few minutes (green light is continuously and rapidly blinking for few minutes, then stops). With the problematic microSD card, the green light stops 5 seconds after powering the RPi. I checked router, the Pi with problematic card does not appear in its list of connected devices even after plugging in the Network wire.
All boot sector file and folders are written, as I can see these in Windows.
Most likely files in /root are not written. I will power up Debian, mount the microSD card and see if /root partition is there.
After writing image and creating files ssh and wpa_supplicant.conf, I ejected the card and physically removed the microSD card from Desktop, then after few minutes slipped in the card again in Desktop, fired up VM/Debian and checked. Everything seems to be intact, but still the microSD card fails to boot when slipped into RPi-4 and powered up 
What does it show after you try to format that card?
Can be successfully formatted by SD Card Formatter.
After format it shows a blank card.
Sometimes it’s a card that actually has way smaller capacity, manipulated to look like 16GB. So the whatever gets written early “sticks” (Windows folder structure) but then cannot be changed anymore, because writing on SD means writing in new location (past the actual physical memory size) and then erasing the old one.
When a couple years ago said that my card failed, people said that’s not possible, because they have their older ones active since years and years.
Yep, the old ones, from a time when SD memory had better lasting materials of NAND cells and Chinese piracy wasn’t rampant.
Heck, I even had a newer SSD die, while older ones are still OK.
