Is it safe to install Linux on a SD card? [closed]

Solution 1:

Assuming the motherboard supports booting an OS from an SD card, the issue is going to be that SD cards do not support wear-leveling, which will lead to loss of data for a normal OS installation. Most would consider this "not safe".

The way others make this work is to install Linux such that it runs from a "RAM" disk with very infrequent writes to the SD card. These can potentially last as long as an SSD, with the obvious limitations of increased memory requirements and no drive cache.

Solution 2:

'Safe' in what way?
It will be slow as all heck & liable to total failure at the slightest provocation.

If you endeavour to continue in this task, backup the card after every single session, or risk losing the whole lot due to the capricious propensity of SD cards to die with no warning.

Solution 3:

This can be done, although doing it successfully means tuning the OS to not constantly write to the SD card. This means moving the swap file off the sdcard and is not suitable for programs that continually update the status to disk. Having /boot on the sdcard is likely the least problematic partition.

The question is "why" do you want to do this - SD cards are small compared to hard drives, and the OS can be tuned to take very little space. Isolation of systems may be better achieved using a VM. You can run Linux off a USB hdd/ssd as well.