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In fairness, it seems to be a very VERY rare thing that an SD card will fuck up beyond repair.

It is incredibly rare. I've never had an SD card fail, and we have gone through a lot of them. It was much more common with CF cards, and mostly high capacity ones at that. I always shy away from the newest "super high capacity" cards, since they can be a bit unstable, but even 128 gig cards are very solid nowadays.