SD and Micro SD cards are wonderful little storage devices, and sometimes I can't believe that I'm holding hundreds of gigabytes in the palm of my hand in something the size of my pinkie nail.
They're so convenient and affordable that they're used in all sorts of applications and devices where really a better form of solid state storage should have been employed. Here are some of the ways we use SD cards that we really shouldn't, but I'm sure we'll keep doing. Myself included!
As a Main Drive for Your PC
Jason Fitzpatrick / How-To Geek
SD cards were never designed to work as operating system drives, and if you do use them in this way, there's a pretty good chance the card will meet its end due to excessive data writes or sustained heat, which shortens the lifespan of flash memory.
Still, quite a few popular devices use SD cards as their OS drives. The Raspberry Pi, for example, uses a micro SD card as its OS drive by default. There are also plenty of handheld emulator devices that use micro SD cards, such as my Anbernic 353VS , which has two SD card slots. One for the OS and one additional for game storage. You might think that these lightweight devices won't put so much load on these cards that they'll fail, but I've had several brand-name SD cards in my various little devices over the years suddenly fail for no reason.
In fact, my general experience with micro SD cards since I started using them in phones, SBCs (Single-Board Computers), and gaming devices is that they're pretty unreliable and I could never entrust them with anything important.
Running AAA Games
Bill Logudice / How-To Geek
Modern AAA games largely require a fast NVMe drive or, at the very least, a SATA III SSD. SD cards, even the fastest ones, are really no faster than mechanical hard drives on average. The new SD Card Express standard (which is a whole new thing) barely manages to keep up with early-generation NVMe drives, though they are an order of magnitude faster than the older SD card standard.
So why would this problem even come up? Well, first there's the rise of handheld gaming PCs, which currently offer a micro SD card slot to expand storage above and beyond what the internal NVMe drive offers. There are also laptops with SD card slots, which is another opportunity to use SD cards to store games. This means you have the option to install any of your games on this drive, even when it clearly won't keep up with the demands of said game.
Older games, AAA or not, are of course fine. Anything designed for the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One generation or older will run fine from an SD card, because these games were designed with mechanical hard drives in mind, and they might not even benefit that much from being on a modern NVMe drive .
Long-Term File Archiving
Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
It's hard to think of a worse medium for long-term data storage than an SD card. Apart from the seemingly random failures these cards can undergo at any time in their lifecycle, they wear out fast and suffer from bit rot . This is where the electrical charges in the memory cells leak out over time, erasing the data. This is a non-issue of the card is powered on periodically, but if you throw an SD card into a safety deposit box, don't expect your data to still be readable a decade later.
Dashcams and Security Cameras
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
This is another one of those funny situations where SD cards are commonly used, but are really a poor choice. Dash cameras and security cameras commonly use SD cards to store their footage, and constantly write as they record. This is exactly what you don't want to do with an SD card. It's also the reason you can find special ' surveillance " or security SD cards designed to take this punishment.
Still, it would be better to use more durable solid-state memory that can handle many more write cycles, but, of course, this will make the cameras more expensive for a feature most customers don't even know would be to their benefit.
As a Backup Solution
I already alluded to this above, but you should never use an SD card to back up data. In fact, the reverse is true. Any data you're not willing to suddenly lose that only lives on an SD card should be backed up to the cloud, to a hard drive or proper SSD, or even to an optical disc or tape. Anything other than an SD card.
SD cards are awesome , I love using them, and I'm happy they exist, but reliability and performance are not part of their value proposition. Which means you shouldn't use them for anything that depends on either factor.
