StarTech SATA to USB Adapter, USB 5Gbps, 2.5in SATA III (USB3S2SAT3CB)

Regarding microSD card reliability, one option would be to simply forego the microSD card completely and boot the Raspberry Pi 4 via an SSD connected to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB 3.0 ports.

I was originally going to recommend checking out this¹ article for instructions on how to do it. However, much of the instructions are no longer valid (as of two weeks ago!) since they assume that the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t natively support booting from USB, which finally isn’t the case (although only if you use the current beta bootloader²). I’d still recommend reading it though, as it also mentions known working 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0, M.2 NVMe to USB 3.0, M.2 SATA to USB 3.0, and mSATA to USB 3.0 adapters. In addition, I’d recommend checking out this³ article with some recommended SSDs; in particular, this⁴ 120 GB Kingston A400 SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive coupled with this⁵ StarTech 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter, which also has the added bonus of giving you far better speeds than a microSD card would! As the author of that article mentions:

“The Kingston A400 drive performs really well in the Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmarks⁶. It’s a great drive and is cheaper than many mid-range MicroSD cards.

The 2.5″ SATA to USB adapter above allows us to do this. There is no power adapter needed as SSDs are low power and are powered by the Pi through USB.”

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¹ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-gu...

² — https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb

³ — https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-storage-benchmarks-2...

⁴ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6JQS8C/

⁵ — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJZJI84/

⁶ — https://storage.jamesachambers.com/