I want to build myself a computer that doesn’t have old fashioned hard drives, or even new SSD drives. I want my computer to be a RAID setup with high capacity SD cards. Small, quiet, and SD cards are increasingly a commodity.
That way it lasts, and so does the software setup, as long as the motherboard and CPU. Would this work? And when the motherboard and/or CPU do crap out, would I be able to replace them and still have the OS and various software still working? I’m under the impression that some software can be registered to only one CPU.
Mechanical drives will also wear out. Even the pyramids have seen better days. Modern SSD drives have good wear leveling algorithms and will be replaced by something far cheaper and much better in basically all respects before they fail due to write cycle limitation. SSD drives are about 45 cents per gig. SD cards seem to be about the same price. Based on that I would definitely go for SSD as it faster and the wear leveling is better.
Yes, just to emphasise the point. SD cards are not intended for many (where many is measured in millions) of write cycles. They may start to show errors very quickly when used as a general purpose data storage in a computer. Indeed I have seen just this happen when a USB stick was used as a boot device. The USB drive was basically toast after a few months.
SSD drives include significantly more sophisticated controller chips that are responsible for managing wear levelling, and this provides a dramatic gain in the number of effective write cycles. It is this additional logic that you are paying for in an SSD drive. More than this - different SSDs are rated for different numbers of cycles. “Enterprise” quality SSDs are significantly more expensive, but if you look at the number of write cycles they can manage, it is vastly bigger than “ordinary” SSDs. If you were using an SSD for a database or file-system journal you would need an enterprise level SSD, and a normal duty one would be dead in months. Normal home use won’t generally see this problem, so ordinary duty SSDs usually suffice.
You could also run a RAM drive in conjunction with your SSD, having it write back to the SSD every half an hour or whatever. It’d be much faster and result in less overall writing to your SSD or SD card. But yeah, no reason to use an SD card in this instance.
Also, what is the point of this experiment? Even if you built hardware that lasts, it’s unlikely that newer software will support it well after a few years.
If you’re concerned with data longevity, then you really need to know that all your options suck. There is simply no way to keep the data around long term unless you engrave it in stone. Plan on having to replace drives every five years or so, and that’s with light use. Redundancy is good for increasing reliability, but it doesn’t reduce the maintenance cost. Additionally, consider any data that exists in only one physical location to exist only in a very provisional, ephemeral sort of way, like words smeared in a frosty window.
You can build that ,because you can get SD to SATA adaptors, which make the SD cards appear to be SATA drives.
Yeah if you change the motherboard OEM software like Windows and Office will complain about it. Full version should be fixable, but Other software may complain and be less fixable if the original company is no longer in contact, or just deny all knowledge… or take 6 months to say “Or how about buy the latest version ? It even has 1000 bugs fixed.”
You seem to be under the impression that SD cards are superior to SSD in some ways. That’s not so. They’re the same technology, except SSD drives have much better controllers so they are faster and last longer (because of the wear leveling algorithms in the controller) than SD cards.