One nuance of the first few iterations of any new design is that rarely comes optimized in every important aspect from scratch.
It is very difficult to cover everything, when we are creating something new from the ground up. The creation process is by itself a very good sink of our cognitive energy and focus, leaving little room for a more pedantic mode of thought.
A problem with the earlier generations of Raspberry Pi's, especially the Pi 1 and the Pi 2 up to version 1.1, is that these cannot be configured to boot from an external USB storage device.
This is a particular relevant limitation for a number of reasons, including the fact that relying on an SD card for most of the storage needs is a solution that may have limited endurance.
The later versions of the Raspberry Pi (RPi 2 v1.2 and upwards), already offer some form of allowing external USB media to boot the operating system.
For some time I have been using the same Raspberry Pi 2 v1.1 as the infrastructure for my Hass.io instance. It proved to perform quite reliably over the approximately 18 months I have been using it 24x7. From that time during approximately 1 year I used the same SanDisk Ultra XC I 64 GB MicroSD card:
Just for precaution I have later switched to a similar card, a SanDisk Ultra HC I 32 GB, and moved my Hass.io installation onto it:
