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Sd cards will wear out

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Pixy

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It has come to my notice and great surprise that Flash cards (all varieties) will deteriorate over time.

That deterioration will be reflected in the pics you take or the music you store etc.

This fact was confirmed for me by with the people I just spoke with at Sandisk.

That being a fact, finding a manufacturer that provides a lifetime warranty now becomes a much bigger issue.

The Sandisk people asked what card I have, when I told them it is an Ultra II they said not to worry the card has a lifetime warranty and they will replace it if it fails in any way.

Pixy.
 
Pixy said:
It has come to my notice and great surprise that Flash cards (all
varieties) will deteriorate over time.

That deterioration will be reflected in the pics you take or the
music you store etc.

This fact was confirmed for me by with the people I just spoke with
at Sandisk.

That being a fact, finding a manufacturer that provides a lifetime
warranty now becomes a much bigger issue.

The Sandisk people asked what card I have, when I told them it is
an Ultra II they said not to worry the card has a lifetime warranty
and they will replace it if it fails in any way.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
I think we all know that nothing lasts forever. But it sure is nice to have a manufacturer acknowledge this! Thanks for the post.

Ed
 
At what point do you decide that the "deterioration" is such that the card has "failed" and needs to be replaced? Will Sandisk agree? How far along in your "life" or the card's "life" will that be? 5 years? 10 years? How far along in Sandisk's "life" will that be? Dont worry about it. Go out and take pictures and wear the card out and get another one for $20 plus a $10 rebate.
--
Fred
FZ1v2
http://www.ishots.net
 
fmoore said:
At what point do you decide that the "deterioration" is such that
the card has "failed" and needs to be replaced? Will Sandisk
agree? How far along in your "life" or the card's "life" will that
be? 5 years? 10 years? How far along in Sandisk's "life" will
that be? Dont worry about it. Go out and take pictures and wear
the card out and get another one for $20 plus a $10 rebate.
--
Fred
FZ1v2
http://www.ishots.net
Click to expand...
Hi Fred,

I would think it could be a combination of use and time and maybe temperature etc. etc.

What if you were buying a larger capacity card without realizing the potential for deterioration?

8 or 16 or more gig for several thousand dollars, would you care then if you had a lifetime warranty?

Some folk are possibly using these cards for long term storage without realizing the potential for the loss of their treasures.

Pixy.
 
I've never heard of anyone who had a card wear out, although I've heard of cards that have failed. They've all been Sandisk, as has been discussed many times here in the past. That's why many of us don't use them no matter what the warranty is. I know a few of you have used them and not had trouble, but there have been more people who have reported their Sandisk had failed.

Pixy, you wouldn't happen to be a stock holder, would you? LOL....

Maureen
 
If people are really out there using their memory cards as permanent
storage and just buying new ones they are idiots and deserve what is
coming to them. :)

Besides, anyone with common sense would buy multiple 2GB cards instead
of an 8 or 16. Or even multiple 1GB cards... no point in spending more for
one and risking images.
Pixy said:
fmoore said:
At what point do you decide that the "deterioration" is such that
the card has "failed" and needs to be replaced? Will Sandisk
agree? How far along in your "life" or the card's "life" will that
be? 5 years? 10 years? How far along in Sandisk's "life" will
that be? Dont worry about it. Go out and take pictures and wear
the card out and get another one for $20 plus a $10 rebate.
--
Fred
FZ1v2
http://www.ishots.net
Click to expand...
Hi Fred,

I would think it could be a combination of use and time and maybe
temperature etc. etc.

What if you were buying a larger capacity card without realizing
the potential for deterioration?

8 or 16 or more gig for several thousand dollars, would you care
then if you had a lifetime warranty?

Some folk are possibly using these cards for long term storage
without realizing the potential for the loss of their treasures.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
 
Pixy said:
fmoore said:
At what point do you decide that the "deterioration" is such that
the card has "failed" and needs to be replaced? Will Sandisk
agree? How far along in your "life" or the card's "life" will that
be? 5 years? 10 years? How far along in Sandisk's "life" will
that be? Dont worry about it. Go out and take pictures and wear
the card out and get another one for $20 plus a $10 rebate.
--
Fred
FZ1v2
http://www.ishots.net
Click to expand...
Hi Fred,

I would think it could be a combination of use and time and maybe
temperature etc. etc.

What if you were buying a larger capacity card without realizing
the potential for deterioration?

8 or 16 or more gig for several thousand dollars, would you care
then if you had a lifetime warranty?

Some folk are possibly using these cards for long term storage
without realizing the potential for the loss of their treasures.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
I have a feeling that by the time one of these cards does "wear out" even an 8 or 16 GB card is going to be dirt cheap or even obsolete.

--
All pictures posted are from my trusty FZ20.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in our universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
 
SD cards are flash memory devices and all flash devices wear out: each bit can be toggled only so many times. ("Only so many" is typically greater than 10,000.)

They can offer exceptionally long term data retention - I've seen specs of 100 years. (So I'd believe at least 10 :-)

Typical usage - take a bunch of pix, delete the uglies, repeat; dump the card to a computer, erase all; do it again - can be hard on a flash card.

Your best bet is to fill'em up before erasing them.
Pixy said:
Hi Fred,

I would think it could be a combination of use and time and maybe
temperature etc. etc.

What if you were buying a larger capacity card without realizing
the potential for deterioration?

8 or 16 or more gig for several thousand dollars, would you care
then if you had a lifetime warranty?

Some folk are possibly using these cards for long term storage
without realizing the potential for the loss of their treasures.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
--
Walter Mitty
(Everyone has a secret life.)
 
walter.mitty said:
SD cards are flash memory devices and all flash devices wear out:
each bit can be toggled only so many times. ("Only so many" is
typically greater than 10,000.)

They can offer exceptionally long term data retention - I've seen
specs of 100 years. (So I'd believe at least 10 :-)

Typical usage - take a bunch of pix, delete the uglies, repeat;
dump the card to a computer, erase all; do it again - can be hard
on a flash card.

Your best bet is to fill'em up before erasing them.
Click to expand...
Very well explained ... I agree.

I'm having a 2 year old 64 MB SD-card (guess what brand) that has a
different problem: it's mechanically worn out. I did handle it carefully
and it was not used much, I bought it for my miniDV camcorder to store
still pictures on, but didn't use that feature much, image quality is
not really good.

The mechanical problem seems to be with the electrical contact plates.
E.g. I insert it into the camera or card-reader (tried different ones,
all the same), and often the card can't be accessed. Re-inserting doesn't
help, unless I bend the card slightly to and fro with my fingers!?!

Well, we all know what a 64 MB card costs now, so warranty or not is not
really important. In my oppinion, expecting SD cards to be fail-save is
foolish, no matter what brand or warranty period. As with all computer
related things, make backups, and keep redundancy high ...

Wolfgang
 
Please do not store your photos on cards. Even CDs and DVDs are prone to fail .Keep multiple backups as I'm sure most of you do. I also like having 4 256k cards rather than one 1mb card. It's why I drive a Mystique instead of a lexus. I'd feel really bad if my new Lexus got a scratch on it but my Mystique .....

--
Panasonic DMC-FZ20
Sunpak 383 Super
 
Mareda said:
I've never heard of anyone who had a card wear out, although I've
heard of cards that have failed. They've all been Sandisk, as has
been discussed many times here in the past. That's why many of us
don't use them no matter what the warranty is. I know a few of you
have used them and not had trouble, but there have been more people
who have reported their Sandisk had failed.

Pixy, you wouldn't happen to be a stock holder, would you? LOL....
Click to expand...
So Maureen,

because you have never heard of it (cards that wear out) it cannot be?

What is the point of you reply?

You have no idea (nor do I) what the volume of sales, or the volume of failures, between all the manufactures are?

Do you think that Sandisk could remain in business if they relied on "a few of you people have used them and not had trouble"

Here is a company that stands behind it's product. You find something wrong with that. Why?

It appears that you are one of a group of people, who, even though you have no personal experience of a product feel the need to denegrate it, over and over and over again.

Why?

I am a stockholder in humanity and if it is okay with you (even if it is not),

will continue to try and help folk by passing on any information which I think will be of value them.

Pixy.
 
I heard 10 years of flawless operation.

Good enough for me... hard to find a cam which will stay competative for more than 3 years.

F
Pixy said:
It has come to my notice and great surprise that Flash cards (all
varieties) will deteriorate over time.

That deterioration will be reflected in the pics you take or the
music you store etc.

This fact was confirmed for me by with the people I just spoke with
at Sandisk.

That being a fact, finding a manufacturer that provides a lifetime
warranty now becomes a much bigger issue.

The Sandisk people asked what card I have, when I told them it is
an Ultra II they said not to worry the card has a lifetime warranty
and they will replace it if it fails in any way.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
 
Being a professional "memory expert," (at least in the field of semiconductor memory), I thought I'd pour a little oil on the water here. Is there a "wearout mechanism?" Yes, and in the case of Samsung, one of the world's largest suppliers of the type of flash chips used in SD cards, the specification for one of their 1-gigabit chips says that one can "write and erase" memory cell locations at least 100,000 times. Data is written in small "pages," and then erased when the time comes, in "blocks," each block containing 1 megabit of data. If you take a Samsung 1-gigabit memory chip and embed it with 7 others on a substrate to make a 1GB SD card, this means that each time you write a single photo, say from an FZ20, of about 2 megabytes in size, you're using up ~ 2 "blocks" of data per photo on each of the 8 semiconductor chips in the SD card. So, to fill up the SD cards with photos, you'd be able to stuff in something like 500 photos. To "wear out" the chips, from the specification, you'd have to store 500 photos, 100,000 times! In short, you'd have to take 50 million shots to reach the "wearout" condition. Now, I consider myself to be a prolific shooter; I've had my FZ10 for 4 months and have shot nearly 8,000 images with it. (Not all of them great, for sure!) At the specified rate of wearout, and using my camera at this rate, in 2,000 years my PQI 1GB card will be shot! Somehow, I don't think I'll be around to complain. Note that a smaller card will "wear out" faster. A 128MB card, for example, will "wear out" in only 250 years. Still not a problem. Easy to see why these things can have a "lifetime" guarantee, right? There IS also a specified 10-year storage life for data, so using SD cards as permanent photo archives is probably not well advised, as others have said.
--
Just let a smile be your umbrella!

John Reed

Panasonic Big and Lil Fluzis, Nikon Macromaker
 
Very informative John.... Thanks

--
Kodak DC-4800
Panasonic FZ-10 and FZ 20
T Con 17 -- Raynox 2020 pro -- Tcon 14 --DCR 720



Just trying to learn and it's slow going!
Gene
 
Thanks John,

That was what we needed.

Now I can sleep nights.

Pixy
 
woho said:
The mechanical problem seems to be with the electrical contact plates.
E.g. I insert it into the camera or card-reader (tried different ones,
all the same), and often the card can't be accessed. Re-inserting
doesn't
help, unless I bend the card slightly to and fro with my fingers!?!
Click to expand...
Just curious. Have you tried cleaning the contacts of the card with a pencil eraser to see if that helps? Sometimes over a period of time the contacts become slightly corroded and can be cleaned in this way. Don't get too aggressive in the cleaning but just rub them lightly until they are shiny again. This may or may not help. :)

Maurice

--
Organic imagination, digital views...

My Pbase galleries: http://www.pbase.com/zwerg

 
Pixy said:
So Maureen,

because you have never heard of it (cards that wear out) it cannot be?

What is the point of you reply?
Click to expand...
My point was that with all the things we've read about SD cards, and all the posting that's been done about them, I would have thought that something would have been mentioned somewhere along the way if SD cards wearing out was an issue. I don't think hearing one Sandisk employee stating it's a problem would have convinced me, so I tried to remember if I'd heard anything else and realized I hadn't.
Pixy said:
It appears that you are one of a group of people, who, even though
you have no personal experience of a product feel the need to
denegrate it, over and over and over again.

Why?
Click to expand...
I've heard enough horror stories from friends and family, and I've read enough on various forums to know that I'll never use certain products. You have the right to post ad nauseaum about how great the Sandisk warranty is, but then, others also have the right to state an opposite view. I do find it curious that you spend so much time trying to defend your choice in cards. It's an emotional investment I just don't understand.
Pixy said:
I am a stockholder in humanity and if it is okay with you (even if
it is not),
will continue to try and help folk by passing on any information
which I think will be of value them.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
You call it helpful, but it just seems like one more attempt to push Sandisk. If you really feel it's such a great choice, then feel confident enough that you don't have to convince others it is, too.

Maureen
 
John_Reed said:
Being a professional "memory expert," (at least in the field of
semiconductor memory), I thought I'd pour a little oil on the water
here. Is there a "wearout mechanism?" Yes, and in the case of
Samsung, one of the world's largest suppliers of the type of flash
chips used in SD cards, the specification for one of their
1-gigabit chips says that one can "write and erase" memory cell
locations at least 100,000 times. Data is written in small "pages,"
and then erased when the time comes, in "blocks," each block
containing 1 megabit of data. If you take a Samsung 1-gigabit
memory chip and embed it with 7 others on a substrate to make a 1GB
SD card, this means that each time you write a single photo, say
from an FZ20, of about 2 megabytes in size, you're using up ~ 2
"blocks" of data per photo on each of the 8 semiconductor chips in
the SD card. So, to fill up the SD cards with photos, you'd be able
to stuff in something like 500 photos. To "wear out" the chips,
from the specification, you'd have to store 500 photos, 100,000
times! In short, you'd have to take 50 million shots to reach the
"wearout" condition. Now, I consider myself to be a prolific
shooter; I've had my FZ10 for 4 months and have shot nearly 8,000
images with it. (Not all of them great, for sure!) At the specified
rate of wearout, and using my camera at this rate, in 2,000 years
my PQI 1GB card will be shot! Somehow, I don't think I'll be around
to complain. Note that a smaller card will "wear out" faster. A
128MB card, for example, will "wear out" in only 250 years. Still
not a problem. Easy to see why these things can have a "lifetime"
guarantee, right? There IS also a specified 10-year storage life
for data, so using SD cards as permanent photo archives is probably
not well advised, as others have said.
--
Just let a smile be your umbrella!

John Reed

Panasonic Big and Lil Fluzis, Nikon Macromaker
Click to expand...
Very interesting, John. Now I know why I've never seen any posts or articles about this. It really is nothing to worry about. Thanks for the facts.

Maureen
 
Mareda said:
Mareda said:
So Maureen,

because you have never heard of it (cards that wear out) it cannot be?

What is the point of you reply?
Click to expand...
My point was that with all the things we've read about SD cards,
and all the posting that's been done about them, I would have
thought that something would have been mentioned somewhere along
the way if SD cards wearing out was an issue. I don't think
hearing one Sandisk employee stating it's a problem would have
convinced me, so I tried to remember if I'd heard anything else and
realized I hadn't.
Mareda said:
It appears that you are one of a group of people, who, even though
you have no personal experience of a product feel the need to
denegrate it, over and over and over again.

Why?
Click to expand...
I've heard enough horror stories from friends and family, and I've
read enough on various forums to know that I'll never use certain
products. You have the right to post ad nauseaum about how great
the Sandisk warranty is, but then, others also have the right to
state an opposite view. I do find it curious that you spend so
much time trying to defend your choice in cards. It's an emotional
investment I just don't understand.
Mareda said:
I am a stockholder in humanity and if it is okay with you (even if
it is not),
will continue to try and help folk by passing on any information
which I think will be of value to them.

Pixy.
Click to expand...
You call it helpful, but it just seems like one more attempt to
push Sandisk. If you really feel it's such a great choice, then
feel confident enough that you don't have to convince others it is,
too.
Click to expand...
So Maureen,

Now we find that you really do have a vendetta against Sandisk or anyone who feels that they are good company. Why?

I think if we look back we will find that your own posts denegrating Sandisk will make up the bulk of negative thoughts on these forums just as this one is.

It is notable that you chime in on any post that mentions Sandisk with your personally unsubstantiated hearsay and negativity, time after time.

I note that you had no reply to my question "What is wrong with a company that stands behind it's product". Why?

Why should you be concerned with the fact that I enjoy trying to help folk?

My post was about a possible problem. It was you who took the opportunity, not to add anything of value, but to attack Sandisk and myself.

You are not the keeper of these forums which the statement you made below would have us believe.

You call it helpful, but it just seems like one more attempt to
Mareda said:
push Sandisk. If you really feel it's such a great choice, then
feel confident enough that you don't have to convince others it is,
too.
Click to expand...
Get a life.

Pixy.
 
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