> how do I ensure I'm paying extra for actual quality and not just sucker tax? Objectively? You can't. You can make sure you don't get a counterfeit by never b

> how do I ensure I'm paying extra for actual quality and not just sucker tax? Objectively? You can't. You can make sure you don't get a counterfeit by never buying on amazon or ebay. And you can test things like the write speed are as claimed. But to actually measure the longevity of a card? You've got to buy a load of them, use them intensively in realistic conditions, and carefully investigate every failure to produce statistics. You can get plenty of anecdotes from DIYers, but let me tell you: My headless Raspberry Pi doesn't show up on the network? Could be a failed microsd card. Could be the disk's full so some log is blocking on a write. Could be a bad software update. Could be I powered it off mid-software-update. Could be weak wifi. Could be I brought a counterfeit microsd. Could be something I plugged into the GPIO. Could be a barely adequate power supply. Could be I messed up a setting and now the DHCP or the SSH server isn't working right. Could be it getting recruited into a botnet. Could be it changing IP addresses and me trying to connect to the old one. Are you going to take my word for it when I say it was the microsd card for sure?