So I took it upon myself to answer the question of “what are the best and cheapest microSD cards out there?” This includes evaluating whether they’re fake flash, how well they perform, and how many read/write cycles they can endure before they start failing. So far I’ve tested four to the point of failure, I have 37 being tested right now, and I have 21 more waiting to be tested.
Sorry for the horrendous cable management — I have cable ties on order.
Not sure SD's are competitive for performance / durability but it'd be interesting to see (presumably) how much lower the power consumption is, especially if you can disable / enable the usb port they're connected to on demand for something like media storage where an extra second or so startup time isn't an issue,