SD card lifespan?

[John Connor]

I use a netbook that is on 24/7 and one of its purposes is a Filezilla FTP server. The storage is on a 15 GB SD card. About every other week I write about 85 MBs to the SD card. How often should I replace this SD card with my use?

 

[corkyg]

I would keep it duplicated regularly. I don't know of any accurate predictor of failure, I use them in cameras for years with frequent re-formats every time I off load a batch. Never had one fail yet.

 

[John Connor]

Yeah, I actually clone the little netbook to a USB stick. The HDD in that thing is like 10 GB and fits nicely on a 15 GB stick, but I never thought of copying the SD card. I guess I'll buy another one and do just that.

 

[C1]

Ive had similar good luck/experience with the "cards", but man-o-man have I gone thru USB sticks. (People I run into report similar experiences.)Therefore, I consider such sticks dangerous. The issue might not be so much the sticks themselves (eg, quality of the electronics), but that they become damaged from being constantly moved in & out of circuit, sometimes not using (for whatever reason - usually error or oversight) the "safe removal" OS function.

I therefore never consider buying a stick greater than 16Gb as it is simply imprudent to store large amounts of "info" on any one of them.

 

[John Connor]

I've always been paranoid about USB devices and always use safe removal. To my surprise however I don't have a safe removal option when I plug my phone into the computer.

 

[hojnikb]

If you dont do a lot of writing, you should be fine.
Just keep a backup of everything, as always.

 

[AlienTech]

You can still re write the card like 200 times. They do work like a very cheap SSD so that still means you can write 3TB of data easily to the card.. It is why for cameras you buy expensive cards costing 5-10 times as much since they are SLC usually for high end cameras and cheaper MLC cards for small cameras which also cost 3-5 times as much. All other cheapo cards are TLC but they still work 100-500 rewrites easily, only problem is some dont have garbage collection and if you deleted stuff and write, it writes to very same area. So it is safer to move old files into a temp directory for storage and not actually erase the files. Then when the card gets full, format it again and use it. The cards will work a lot longer.. This is only for the very cheap cards without any things like block allocation and garbage collection type controllers. So you are manually doing wear leveling youself by hand. Hence why these cards dont work in cameras and fail in a few months or less as it keeps writign the picture data to the very same locations over and over instead of storing it all over the card memory.

 

[hojnikb]

You can still re write the card like 200 times. They do work like a very cheap SSD so that still means you can write 3TB of data easily to the card.. It is why for cameras you buy expensive cards costing 5-10 times as much since they are SLC usually for high end cameras and cheaper MLC cards for small cameras which also cost 3-5 times as much. All other cheapo cards are TLC but they still work 100-500 rewrites easily, only problem is some dont have garbage collection and if you deleted stuff and write, it writes to very same area. So it is safer to move old files into a temp directory for storage and not actually erase the files. Then when the card gets full, format it again and use it. The cards will work a lot longer.. This is only for the very cheap cards without any things like block allocation and garbage collection type controllers. So you are manually doing wear leveling youself by hand. Hence why these cards dont work in cameras and fail in a few months or less as it keeps writign the picture data to the very same locations over and over instead of storing it all over the card memory.

Thats not true at all. Every NAND device has some sort of garbage collection (if it didin't, it would brick itself the moment you wanted to write something new to it).
Also pretty much every SD card made in the last few years features wearlevelling (static and dynamic).

 

[ronbo613]

You can still re write the card like 200 times.

I don't think so. If that were true, all the SD cards in my various cameras would have been dead years ago.

I have heavily used SD cards that have to be at least five or six years old for digital photos and HD video, I can't recall a single failure. I would still have a backup, no matter how well they perform.

 

[Elixer]

Here is a copy of Sandisk's whitepaper on this: https://web.archive.org/web/2015032...rces/hardware/SDcards/WPaperWearLevelv1.0.pdf

This also talks about this in more detail http://electronics.stackexchange.co...d-does-wear-levelling-with-its-own-controller
In short, stay away from generics, since they tend to cut corners in the wrong places.

Side note, I know a few people who have had their images on their cameras get corrupted, and since SD cards offer 0 way of informing people what is going on, when you finally notice it, it is too late to do anything about it.
Get new SD cards for your vacation pics is what I go by.

 

[razel]

You write 85MBs to the card? or 8.5GB? or your write speed is 85MB/s?

Regardless SD cards are cheap. I'd just buy another. Well actually storage is cheap in general so $10 for another card as a backup will be worth your headache if one fails.

In general do not store long term data on SD cards. From the last few podcasts that Anand was on, he mentioned something along the lines of 'if you saw... how bad... NAND on SD...' That's when my thoughts change, however, I've been lucky enough to have not a failure. Regardless though, storage is so stupidenously cheap. It's your fault for losing data by not making a backup.

 

[John Connor]

I write about 85MB to the card about every other week...

Seems like at this rate I don't have much to worry about. But I will buy another as a backup.

 

[AlienTech]

Side note, I know a few people who have had their images on their cameras get corrupted, and since SD cards offer 0 way of informing people what is going on, when you finally notice it, it is too late to do anything about it.
Get new SD cards for your vacation pics is what I go by.

They must have been doing something wrong like inserting the card side ways since we have people with real world experience who have used this for a decade without any problems and they insist this is some kind of glitch in the user experience. I know I had to use a knife to cut the sides off to get mine to fit into the small slot sideways. Others experience may vary.

/sarcasm

 

[nerp]

I don't think so. If that were true, all the SD cards in my various cameras would have been dead years ago.

I have heavily used SD cards that have to be at least five or six years old for digital photos and HD video, I can't recall a single failure. I would still have a backup, no matter how well they perform.

You know, as the years go by, I'm finding that this is the same for me; I have some heavily used and abused old cards and they work good as new to this day, never a failure. I know it happens but I think we tend to worry about flash memory failing much more than we have to. I'm wondering if we discover the same is true for SSDs and 10 years from now we'll be talking about these ancient SSDs that still work just fine despite our worries about running out of writes some day.

 

[tweakboy]

80 years. lol