It would be interesting to know if someone put a raspberry pi inside and outside space station in exposed complete unprotected environment and run some continuous tests, how long would we start to see any failures and what kind failure would be that be.
This has been done multiple times. Amateur radio satellites and some cubesat kits [1] use primarily COTS components.
The lifetime and radiation environment for those applications are very limited, though. It seems that for short missions (e.g. <2 years) and low orbits (<500km), COTS hardware should be fine if properly shielded.
It would be interesting to see what difference it actually makes for HEO or even BEO missions, especially if a high degree of redundancy is introduced as well.
