this might just be my bad luck, but I really get frustrated with all my raspberry pis... I've ordered some faster cards but seriously suspect my rPi B+ to fail. Is there a number out there on how fast the controller of the PI can read SD cards? Is it worth to grab fancy class 10 cards? Let's see how the new image works.

25MB/s throughput and most likely 22MB/s - class 10 is fine then....

in a nutshell: the newest image of raspbian from september doesn't work well with dd, I always end up with 1byte more at "records in" which made the 2nd partition a no-show.

Now inspecting the SD cards for faults by following this (hopefully) awesome tutorial, using F3.

http://www.broes.nl/2012/08/verify-the-integrity-of-a-flash-sd-card-on-a-mac/

First card output makes me think that my card is fine but my raspberry PI is not :(

wake:AltraMayor-f3-795424c davedarko$ ./f3write /Volumes/UNTITLED/
Free space: 3.74 GB
Creating file 1.h2w ... OK!                        
Creating file 2.h2w ... OK!                        
Creating file 3.h2w ... OK!                        
Creating file 4.h2w ... OK!                        
Free space: 0.00 Byte
Average writing speed: 8.65 MB/s
wake:AltraMayor-f3-795424c davedarko$ ./f3read /Volumes/UNTITLED/
                  SECTORS      ok/corrupted/changed/overwritten
Validating file 1.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 2.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 3.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 4.h2w ... 1556288/        0/      0/      0

  Data OK: 3.74 GB (7847744 sectors)
Data LOST: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	       Corrupted: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	Slightly changed: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	     Overwritten: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
Average reading speed: 17.19 MB/s

So only one card shows corrupted sectors. The newest Raspbian image does not like me (dd throws in 1 byte too many). Arch Linux seemed to work and also openELEC. With the new ordered SD cards [16gb class10] and [8gb uhs-1] I have 9 SD cards I can work with. Interesting to see how fast they can actually go and some results are surprising, like the crappy 8GB card and the speedy transcend. I'll try the 16GB tomorrow and also check out the BTRFS Raid1 mode. I might get 2GB for the system and 6GB data storage out of it.

* Seems like the SD card reader integrated in the MacBook Air 2010 is a bit slow, so I started reading the cards again with a Transcend USB 3.0 dongle on the USB 2.0 input. The new data is in brackets.

More links for preventing corrupting SD cards / FS from raspberry PI

http://www.ideaheap.com/2013/07/stopping-sd-card-corruption-on-a-raspberry-pi/

maybe even use the SD card only for the boot fs and use a usb stick for data etc.

https://www.talksharp.com/how-to-prevent-the-raspberry-pi-from-corrupting-sd-cards

"[...] read-only mode. If there's nothing being written to your SD card, it won't get damaged no matter what you do."

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/8038

"The best resistance against corruption on a single SD card would be offered by BTRFS in RAID1 mode with automatic scrub run every predefined period of time."

http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/186954

What should I do with SD cards that are corrupted?