@mumblebaj Not qualified to answer but will piggyback a comment about an issue that I got into in a year or so back as it relates to these microsd cards.

About a year ago I bought a kit from Raspberry Shake and they wanted to sell me a microSD Card that had their logo on it but amounted to an industrial grade microSD Card. I got curious about the cards because they can be significantly higher priced than a consumer grade card. I came away from that dive down the rabbit hole that they undergo a much more harsh testing/qualification regime than what you would find at your local electronics store.
They are oriented towards industrial applications that might see significant vibration and/or temperature extremes.

This is what I bought and for where I have that earthquake detector it is probably extreme overkill but better safe than sorry.

If you are curious about things Raspberry Pi’s get used for every hexagon on the below picture represents a Pi being used as an earthquake detector.
When the Tonga volcano exploded you could see how tremors traveled, worldwide.

@sdetweil Photography must be a hobby. Smart phone pictures wouldn’t take up that kind of space.

@earnestrichards Which weather provider are you using?

@sdetweil So, if you had a 500 GB HDD or a 240 GB SSD which would you use?
Is there some industry standard as far as creating partitions? Size, Drive letter, etc?

Now, I don’t have any expectation that I would get anywhere remotely near the capacity of either style storage device with meaningful data in form of files I want to save so sort of abstract question here.

The below is based on all experience being from Windows 3.1—>Windows 11
ZERO Linux until discovery of MM.
In a dusty corner of my brain I seem to recall something about when a computer is up and running it uses a portion of its storage media to put a running program on. Say you are running a complex Excel spreadsheet, some of that will be in RAM and some will be a chunk of (historically) HDD space. If I’m way screwed up just say “that ain’t how it works” and I’m fine with that.
BUT, if an SSD only writes once to each block of memory, I could see how that could chew up an SSD’s storage capacity over time

@ankonaskiff17 If I have the big USB drive hard drive or SSD dive I mentioned earlier in this convo, can I create multiple partitions to mimic multiple drives, a small partition to boot Pi from but subsequently the different partitions would represent say c;\ , d;\ etc and just store files folders to different (I guess these would be virtual drives) as I desire? Would just be either the SSD or platter which I’m still debating.
SD Card slot underneath would just be empty

@mumblebaj Our stuff was industrial grade and we had issues with the level sensor but related to day/night temperature & Sun impacting gas. but biggest problem with level sensor was related to it being a cylinder mounted horizontally…

An inch of drop at top of sideways cylinder a lot less than an inch of drop across middle of cylinder so engineers had fun plotting that curve

@mumblebaj What is a “Gas Geyser”?

Another easy monitoring option is to put the tank on a scale. Track weight as % Full.
Not long before I retired we put in a remote pumping station that consisted of 2 3-phase pumps, 3-phase generator that ran on natural gas. Tank for gas had resistance type level sensor.
Used telemetry that sent us a common fault alarm and sent the local gas vendor live level indication.

@sdetweil I’m not going to lie and say “My thoughts exactly” but I have a much better understanding now of the how and why.
So, boot from SSD that is plugged in to bottom of Pi but to minimizes writes to that card, have a jumbo drive to store your work on.

I find myself with a spare SSD and an old but faithful external hard drive.
If I want to load a gazillion pictures to either the SSD or Hard Drive.
Which one is the better choice? Short term, long term.

I want to make a personal calendar that occupies 1/2 the screen and a scrolling picture viewer that occupies the other half. Pretty simple as MM’s go but the picture drive will see activity 24/7/365

I hear stories every day about SSD’s biting the dirt. Admittedly they all seem to be micro-SSD Chips typical of what one burns the Pi OS to and not larger storage based hardware.
Curious about peoples thoughts/experiences.
Both have been long bought and paid for so cost not really in the equation.

@sdetweil How can I send you a PM/DM about a question I have.
Not bad, not good, just a question that I have that is probably not for the MM community writ large.