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I have read from this link https://www.sdcard.org/consumers/faq/#servicelife about SD card's service life that with normal usage it can reached to 10 years or more? Wow, this is truly amazing! I know digital or surveillance cameras used SD card to store captured images and pictures but what if it is used as storage drive to boot and run an operating system (for example, a Linux or FreeBSD on SoC machine) and have data store in it, then what are the do's and dont's to achieve such life span?

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SD cards are designed as expendable. So nobody expect from them to have such a long life.

To make the last longer try to avoid intensive write operations because flash memories have limited amount of write cycles (10k to 100k average).
To keep information reliable for long time use the 3-2-1 rule, 3 copies, 2 different medias, 1 copy off-site.

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  • @Romeo_ninov superuser.com/a/17377/346288 <- I'd say you need to update your information a bit. flash with 10k cycles was a few years ago. Also most tiny embedded processors has evolved over the low write cycle counts. I have been working with enbedded devices for some time, and have not seen any failures (counting quite a few years back) that has been possible to trace back to flash "breakage".
    – Hannu
    Commented Feb 7 at 20:54
  • @Hannu, I agree, but let me repeat it again, SD cards are designed to be expendable. About 100k cycles think about web server with 1 user per second, for 24 hours this is 86400 records. And metadata of log file will write so many times :) Of course this is not exact but just to give idea. P.S. I work with SD in my photo camera so I have idea about the reliability...
    – Romeo Ninov
    Commented Feb 8 at 6:43
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    Thanks @RomeoNinov for sharing your thoughts in answering my question. Given that intensive write operations, if ever it achieves to 100K write cycles, do you think SD is soon to fail or experience wear? For example an SD card is around 64GB capacity and it only achieved 5GB of written data, do you think it will also soon experience wear or fail if this 5GB already reached the 100K write cycle? Even there is ample of space to be written?
    – ordinary_guy
    Commented Feb 11 at 8:18
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    @ordinary_guy, in flash memory are used few different approaches to avoid this. There is special area with blocks to replace failed blocks. And the controller avoid (in standard operations) write many times in the same block. Also the write operations (they involve also clean the block) are postponed to avoid this effect
    – Romeo Ninov
    Commented Feb 11 at 9:41
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    @ordinary_guy, so do not expect making 100k writes and card is out :) Think about SSDs, many of the techniques are used in SD cards too.
    – Romeo Ninov
    Commented Feb 11 at 9:46
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sdcard.org FAQ says:

What is the service life of an SD memory card?

This depends on how your product in manufactured. SD standards-based memory cards, like most semiconductor cards, store information in flash memory. The current technology along with normal usage typically gives the card a lifespan of 10 years or more, allowing consumers to upgrade their devices for many years and reduce consumer electronic waste.

Nevertheless, I get the feeling that this text relates more to the data-retention period of SD cards, rather than their lifetime when in heavy use.

There are two things to do :

  1. Get the highest-quality (and costly) SD card you can afford
  2. Be prepared for bad luck and failure before the 10 years are up.
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