I see flash drives and SD cards as just more planned obsolesence in our consumerist society.
Yeah they have their advantages for fast boot times, and gaming, but they cannot be trusted to hold anything very long. Plus with repeated usage, and normal filesystem journalling, they can degrade pretty damn fast.
HD drives maybe slow but they are at least designed to hold data for a long time.
Im sure I will swap out my system flash drive in other year or two when it seizes.
SD cards? I refused to work with them at $dayjob :) I have made our little machines boot from ethernet instead and run entirely in RAM. flash sticks on USB range from amazingly good to amazingly horrible. It's just that if you find a good one, it's sold out the next day and you won't find the same stuff ever again.
I have made good experiences with business grade SSDs and NVMe RAM. However I do mistrust the ever smaller structures. And I blame the bad experiences with sdCards mainly on their physical size and their thermal non-design together with my use case. I most often write a complete image of an operating system onto them. And they never last much longer than maybe two or three years.
I was about to swallow my words yesterday, after one of my highly touted HDD disks failed to read or write at faster than a few kb/s.
Ran fsck, ran fsck again, still no dice.
Our data is still in a state of migration (the last guy I took over from was of the opinion to distribute data across multiple drives, without any knowledge of file duplicity -- I'm of the opinion of keep everything in one place, and back that place up) so I had not made a backup of this particularly important disk.
At this point I started contemplating the merits of flash drives, and began to question lots of things.
Turns out: the USB port was broken. I switched to the back, and everything worked fine.
Making a backup as we speak,
I sometimes argue, that you cannot test software. You always test the whole stack: case, printed circuit board, power supply, firmware, gateware, cables!!!, connectors, chips, clock circuitry, reset and poweron magic, cpu and other controllers, and finally software too. It can take a long time to even consider that your stack is broken somewhere else. And always use sunscreen (and backup) :-)