On Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:29:30 GMT Richard Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > > I can't think of any software fault that could wipe out so much of a > disk, with no respect for partition boundaries (the dos partition in > the first 64MB had not been mounted). But I also know too little about > the internals of SD cards to understand how they fail. Maybe some > internal logical-to-physical block mapping table went bad?
One possibility: Many SD cards don't implement wear leveling. Without it, if the system is hitting some speicific blocks over and over again, the card will become unusable fast. I was using a $10 USB thumb drive as a boot disk for my FreeBSD based fileserver and forgot to mount it readonly (and unix syncs every 30 seconds to all r/w fs). It was toast within a year. On the raspi I've had good experience with the better quality SanDisk SD cards. I even have venti running on one for the past 6 months -- as an experiment, so I don't care if the card dies!
