While looking through troubleshooting stuff for SD card problems I stumbled across this page and found out something new. You can boot your Pi from USB, but it appears to be a one way deal and permanent. I remember earlier there was a way to boot from the SD and switch to USB. I may go that route if my read/write problems don't stop. See link below:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md
You can still boot up with the SD card, BUT I have tried burning this image onto a Hard Drive and it would NOT boot up, It stays on the flashing _ on the top left screen