Industrial SD Cards
Not all SD cards are created equal
SD cards are common place items used everywhere from mobile phones to car dashboard cameras, what is less known is the underlying technology employed within the SD card varies widely.
SD cards sold for consumer grade equipment often utilise less robust flash storage technology, usually most apparent when suddenly powering the unit off or the flash wearing out over a significantly shorter period. From an industrial IoT standpoint neither of these are desirable qualities for a remote system which will be operating 24/7 often in demanding environments so require a high degree of reliability.
Whilst the eMMC flash storage integrated onto the Raspberry Pi Compute Module gives a vastly more robust result, the ability to make use of use of an SD card as secondary storage to expand the core file system further, in particular for write intensive data-logging usage, would still be advantageous.
Fortunately SD cards are available with much higher grade internals which address the key needs for Industrial IoT applications; unfortunately these tend to have a higher price point per Gbyte than their consumer grade equivalent.
SanDisk have a range of Industrial SD cards which we would recommend for use with our Industrial IoT products as suitable for application or datalogging storage:
SanDisk Industrial SD Card Range Datasheet Brief
SanDisk Industrial SD Card Range Datasheet Long Form
When purchasing Industrial SD cards, due to the marketplace issue with counterfeit product, it is important to procure from a trusted authorised partner, where supply chains can be guaranteed, such as Mouser :