The Pi3 can boot directly off usb, alternatively just have the boot partition config (fat filesystem) on microSD point to the real rootfs on ssd/spinning hdd.
I have a raspbian cups fileserver thats ignoring all this and keeps running for 3 years on the same cheap sd: have it set up to offload almost all writes to tmpfs to reduce wear: /tmp, /var/run, /var/tmp, /var/log, the cups spool folder and more (/var/spool/*). Noatime mount option.
It's at home, an old raspberry was used as a wifi bridge for a laser printer. I basically used only spare/scrap parts. Also: s/fileserver/printserver/ though, my bad.
> relatime
Sits somewhere between atime and noatime, where "somewhere" is tunable. I wanted the least writes, so i went with noatime.
I have a raspbian cups fileserver thats ignoring all this and keeps running for 3 years on the same cheap sd: have it set up to offload almost all writes to tmpfs to reduce wear: /tmp, /var/run, /var/tmp, /var/log, the cups spool folder and more (/var/spool/*). Noatime mount option.