How long do camera memory cards last

SD cards are rated to hold data at something like 10 years sitting idle. I recall reading not sure where about re-energizing cards by occasionally inserting into a reader. Anecdotes The BBC article Digital memories survive extremes covers an interesting study by Digital Camera Shopper on the durability of memory cards. Recovery If you suspect a card may be getting flakey, or if you run into trouble reading a card, immediately create a backup of everything on the card. Peter Mortensen That's durability of the physical flash chip, not the data.

Flash memory suffer from bit rot , en. But it's in most likely intolerable for critical code e. Owl Owl 2 2 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. I have been using a raspi for a sprinkler controller, and just now, at the 3 year mark, the card has gone bad.

Thousands of unrecoverable fsck errors. Perhaps the raspian just logs too much for the flash to manage? After that i turned off swapping in raspbian, and also mounted the root filesystems as read only and then use a ram disk to write temp files. That seems to have worked for me. I think it happened so often for me because i didn't use high quality SD cards and used smaller capacities, so the same blocks were getting rewritten loads.

You need to add noatime to the mount options of all microsd partitions, especially on read-heavy operations. Even when not running a microsd, but a "real" ssd or hdd, noatime will increase your performance.

There's also nodiratime , accumulated commit also worth trying. They don't have a rechargable battery nor many electronic parts smoothing power variations, plus their power supplies are cheap. AFAIK that is one main source of corruption in this case, and doesn't apply to other uses of sd cards.

Show 1 more comment. I don't know if this will help, but Patrick Buick Patrick Buick 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges. I've had quite a few SD cards get corrupted in the lab and a couple fail entirely. Did your testing reveal any particular good brand? Also have you tried industrial SD cards?

That kind of failure rate makes me want to go double-check my backups. If you check out the hard drives failure rate, you will be surprised and even horrified backblaze. Aside from that, I think it will take substantial physical damage to lose data in storage. Colin Pickard Colin Pickard 8, 3 3 gold badges 29 29 silver badges 37 37 bronze badges. What's the problem with using SD cards in space?

Not that I plan on trying anytime soon, just curious A regular SD card is not radiation hardened. The controllers are vulnerable during operation.

You can transport them into space, or into a nuclear reactor core, just don't attempt to operate them there. Suitably hardened flash memory is actually used in space all the time. ColinPickard, yes, it's called industrial flash storage, and it costs 10x to x what normal SD cards cost. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta.

Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked 5. See more linked questions. Related 9. Hot Network Questions. Question feed. But over time the card can reach a point where it no longer has enough memory to keep mapping out damaged cells, or the cells loose there charge quickly and as a result the data becomes corrupt. Raspberry Pi computers that use SD cards as memory can kill SD cards in a matter of days because of the extremely high number of times that the card may be written to.

With a video camera it will depend on how often you use the cards. If you only have one or 2 cards and you shoot a lot I would recommend replacing the cards yearly. If you have lots of cards either use one or two and replace them regularly or try to cycle through all the cards you have to extend their life and avoid any one card from excessive use which might make it less reliable than the rest.

One thing regular SD cards are not good for is long term storage more than a year and never more than 5 years as the charge in the cells will leak away over time. There are special write once SD cards designed for archival purposes where each cell is permanently fused to either On or Off. I have wondered about the life expectancy of SD cards, and also if higher capacity SD cards are less reliable. In retrospect, I should probably have written purchase date on my SD cards to track their age.

Is there a way of reading boss many write cycles a card has had, or would there be any value in doing so? Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. There are two main types of memory cell that are used in solid-state devices like SD cards. Many SD cards use single level memory cells, that are either on or off.

These cells can only store a single value, and as such are fast and reliable. The downside is that you need a lot of them in a big memory card.

Multi-level cell chips are found in most lower cost SD cards. Each of the cells stores a voltage and the level of the voltage represents a number of different values.

Memory cells are insulated in order to prevent the charge leaking away. However, this insulation is eroded every time a write action is performed. Over time, this can result in the voltage in a cell changing slightly, which can cause the data on the SD card to become corrupted. Most modern SD cards are designed to detect these problem cells and avoid them, but over time, if there are too many, the card may not have enough memory to map them.

The exact lifespan of an SD card depends on a number of factors. Pinpointing exactly when you replace your SD card if difficult due to the varied pressure people put them under.

The chances are that your SD card will physically stop working due to damage before it starts corrupting your data. SD cards are made with cheap components to keep the costs down, and as such, are very prone to breaking. One thing that SD cards are definitely not suitable for is long term storage, due to the charge in the cells leaking over time.

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