If this is going to be a contest of throwing anecdotes around, I literally have _multiple_ Win98 VMs on a single 256GB microSD (which is like, 30$?). And so do

If this is going to be a contest of throwing anecdotes around, I literally have _multiple_ Win98 VMs on a single 256GB microSD (which is like, 30$?). And so do a lot of people who are in the target audience of TFA, whom boot their retro hardware from microSDs since it is definitely faster and even more reliable than era-accurate HDDs. And just plain more convenient; you can backup the entire HDD by copying the SD around in a fraction of the time it would take you to clone the HDD. It just makes sense that the microSD would last longer. Even if you assume that it was the worst of the worst of flash memory and each cell would only last 100 times, that still amounts to 20TB of lifetime writes to the microSD. Windows would even use ridiculously large size cluster sizes on a 60GiB drive, so write amplification would be of little concern. You could install Windows 98 over and over continuously as max as allowed by the HDD speed (say 1hr per installation) for a decade and you would still have writes to spare. Paper envelope calculation caveat, but normally flash memory will have at least one order of magnitude more cycles. Let's remember that 90s and early 00s HDDs are not remembered for their longevity, either (search for click of death).