CF Card's life-span? How long?

Hello.

Im just wondering, how long will a typical CF card last in its life-span? How many pictures or MB of transfer read/write you can do before it dies like any other electronic devices?

Have anyone here experienced a CF breakdown from extensive uses or they have failed after certain read/write cycles?

Thanks,
YP

Here is a white-paper from Sandisk that discusses the wear-levelling used on their CompactFlash cards. Other vendors use similar schemes for wear-leveling the flash on the cards. Unfortunately the schemes used are not the same from vendor to vendor even those using the same NAND controller chips may implement different schemes. Even their consumer cards are likely using a different wear-leveling algorithm.

http://www.sandisk.com/pdf/oem/WPaperWearLevelv1.0.pdf

The paper also only discusses the the industrial grade CompactFlash which are rated a longer lifetime (flash is typically rated at 1,000,000 erase cycles per 64k block).

Unless the card is being used constantly like they are in an industrial situations they SHOULD last forever in a typical photographers usage. Back of the envelope calculation...with 1,000,000 erase cycles per block spread across all the blocks on the card, you could fill a card 273 times a day for 10 years before you burn those rated cycles.

Obviously, if the cards don't implement quality wear-leveling the point of failure will be the FAT filesystem blocks because they will get updated with every file write... and the card will more quickly degrade.

Replying to my own post...

Transcend Micro 45x and 80x cards are rated at 100,000 erase cycles...

Which would move you down to 27 times per day completely filling the card...

Well... not that's a lot shorter then forever...

If my CF card lasts 25 years with writing much less then one full card per day, I'll be happy I think... Any more then that and well... I'll be really happy...

Thanks for the good information on this technical stuff..

UZI2D30 said:

Replying to my own post...

Transcend Micro 45x and 80x cards are rated at 100,000 erase cycles...

Which would move you down to 27 times per day completely filling
the card...

Click to expand...

Yea, but the real answer is that no one really knows. However, all of the sources I have seen say that they'll outlast us.

UZI2D30 said:

Transcend Micro 45x and 80x cards are rated at 100,000 erase cycles...

Click to expand...

My first digital camera was a Kodak DC120, in 1997. With it I bought a 20mb Sandisk CF card.

I used it 'heavily' for 2 years. Then, when I traded it in for my first Nikon that card took up permanent residence in my CF card reader. I use it to back up my household checking account. I remove it to download pic files from larger Sandisk cards.

Anyway, the point of this note is that, not only will the card survive many use cycles, but also, it seems to like being 'live' 18 hrs a day.
--
Jerry
CP4500 Canon i950

I remember reading that the contacts are much more likely to wear out before the memory fails, if you remove/insert the card each time you fill it.

Given the current specifications I would say "they last long enough". Even if a CF would last for only ten years, who cares for a 1GB capacity in ten years time? How big was my harddisk ten years ago? If CF cards last 100.000 cycles, almost everyone will see their card fail because of other reasons (mechanical). Even more likely they will have become completely outdated, will be past their economical lifespan, or will have been replaced by another form factor (I do not see CF cards play a major role in ten years time, more likely it will be SD cards or other formats). Just my $0.02

Thanks to all your replies.

So I now know that I dont need to worry about writing and formatting a CF card as it will last me virtually forever since my camera will die faster than the CF. So this means that I rather have to take a look into my camera's shutter counter for reaching its 100,000 clicks for breakdown range rather than counting a CF card read/write cylce.