Run Gateway on SD Card, SSD or HD?

[prairietech]

What is the consensus of the group?  I've never had a SD card failure (yet) on my many other RPi appliances. But the topic of SD card failure has been high on some of the other RPI forums I follow.

[jra]

SD card is cheapest and easiest but like anything else they will fail at the most innopportune time.  Fortunately they are small enough that doing periodic backups is not too onerous if you have another *nix system with some type of RAID'ed storage to back it up to.  Once you have your Pi up and working the way you want it to, power it off, pop the card and make a dd image of the entire card.  Pop it back in, restart the Pi and configure the periodic backup mechanism of your choice.  I use a variant of http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups_2010.html with backups once per day.  If the card ever dies, get a new one, restore the dd backup and then restore the latest nightly backup. If you ever take an update on the Pi that modifies the kernel or boot block you should make another dd image.

[Felix]

I have never experienced an SD card failure in a few years of continuous use, mostly 1 Pi running but 2 at times.
I have used various cards, all genuine brands.
Lately I have settled on this Kingston 4 GB microSDHC Class 4 Flash Memory Card SDC4/4GBET which is consistent in size (so far bought several). It is also fast, performs well and graphs on the gateway load ever faster with this card (100-400ms on most heavy graphs). So I am happy with it. So far in a few months of use this card has not failed either.
For the marginal cost of $4 for this SD I would not bother trying to run on a HDD which is like a few thousand percent larger and bulkier and heavier, eats more power and just makes no sense, at least in the application I am using it for. 4GB of space is plenty for me. If I need more I can buy the same card in larger size.

[mzv72m]

Here is an article talking about moving the file system to a USB drive - HOWTO: Move the filesystem to a USB stick/Drive

I have experienced a SD card failure, but I think it was due to multiple power outages crashing the RPi.  I no longer have to worry about power outages and the RPi crashing since I have added a MightyBoost to that RPi and my Gateway RPi 2 has a MightyHat, which gives each power backup and clean shutdown capability.

[Felix]

In my area there are very rare outages. I have ran my old gateway with a MBoost but when I upgraded to MHat I realized I never implemented a low battery shutdown on that unit. So ... if there was a long outage, it would continue running until the battery was drained and eventually cutoff the Pi while still running. But that never happened.
In my tests and upgrades and other fiddling I have pulled power from the Pi far more times, I think that caused one or two SD card corruptions.