Instead of using a microSD card, your Raspberry Pi gets a great boost in performance and reliability by using an SSD disk.

With an SSD disk there’s absolutely no need to minimize write actions, logging rate and all kinds of other adjustments to get ‘maximum’ performance and reliability.

Just with a 120GB Transcend SSD220S disk, connect to a Raspberry Pi 4 with a cheap Chinese USB<->SATA adapter, you already get results like these. Actually nothing to complain about and things will perform outstanding for such a cheap setup.

Note: A Raspberry Pi 4 still needs a microSD card for its /boot partition because it (still) lacks proper USB boot support, on a Raspberry Pi 3 it’ll work flawless. As we speak, the USB boot support for the Raspberry Pi 4 is work-in-progress and currently they’re beta testing according to this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/booteeprom.md