> ...but that almost everyone does in practice. I haven't personally had an issue with it over 4 years of use.

And lots of people have problems with it in practice. Here's a Reddit thread on SD card corruption. #1 top voted and most commonly suggested way to rectify it? Get a better power supply.

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/3how8w/pi_kee...

If you have a name-brand phone charger it'll probably be OK. So will a decent-quality one from Adafruit or another reputable supplier that's intended for this use. But "use a random charger you have laying around" is terrible advice that significantly contributes to the Pi's issues with SD card corruption.

> In theory, yes, but there's something nice about popping out a microSD, putting it in the adapter it came with, and sliding it into my laptop to re-image (or a USB SD card reader, to image a disk from a Pi host directly). SDs are small, easy to move between machines, and SBCs tend to have their OSes distributed as image files.

You can pop out the SSD or HDD and put it in a USB docking cradle and treat it just like a big SD card. A USB 3.0 docking cradle costs a grand total of $15, so there's no reason not to.

And in contrast, the thing with the RPi is that many people find they need to "pop out the SD card and reflash it" a whole lot. The Pi is really bad about SD card corruption and the community has a blase attitude about it.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1275...

Sure you should keep backups, but with the Pi I found myself needing to use them every two months or so. That's an unacceptable level of reliability for desktop or server applications.

> In contrast, to take a backup image of the computer that I just bought, I needed to download + flash an OS on a USB key, boot, and copy/compress a 256GB disk onto a USB hard drive. It's a lot more steps, a lot more hardware, and there's not a place that I could just download the bare OS image, if I happened to lose the backup. It's just all around a less convenient process.

You're making this sound difficult, but the ironic thing is you have to do most of those steps to flash the RPi's SD card with an OS image anyway. Oh wow, downloading an image file and burning it to a USB stick with Rufus, what a struggle. So much harder than downloading an image file and burning it to an SD card using WinImage.

You can store a backup image anywhere you want. Backing up across the network to your desktop computer works just fine. Linux has had Samba for like two decades now and can mount Windows file shares no problem.

In fact you can even take an image of a running filesystem if you want, so you don't even need to do the disk image thing. Wouldn't be my first choice but it's possible.

> I hear what you're saying though, and I agree: There are a LOT of SBC options out there (and none of the Rasperry Pi computers are necessarily the best technically-suited for most things) and some very nice hardware a couple of price brackets up.

It's not even "a couple price brackets up": I paid $75 for my ECS Liva. I paid $85 each for a pair of Liva Xs with the 2/32 configuration. That's within the expected price range to get a basic Pi system going after adding a SD card, high-quality adapter, etc. And you also get GigE, USB 3.0, mSATA, x86 compatibility, etc.

There's other -alikes with eMMC available too, and I'd rather do eMMC than a SD card.