SD Card leveling wear?

[MunkyTOS]

Hey OC'ers,


Looking to get any solid information I can find on this. At work we have media players that will be reading from SD HC 8gb cards to play video files on. What we're wondering is the life expectancy in this environment to determine length of videos to use/avoid to prevent issues where we can. Any help is greatly appreciated


Jon

 

[Mpegger]

I have nothing definitive other then the usual information: Reading is generally not a problem, it's writing that is. Most (if not all) modern controllers built into the memory card have wear leveling built in, as memory cards generally have much lower write cycles then SSDs. If you plan and just writing some video files once, and then reading off the cards constantly, you should have no worries. If you plan on using the cards as a main drive to house an OS as well, then expect a short life unless the OS loads and runs entirely from ram with minimal writes to the cards (there are a number of Linux builds that are made in this manner to accommodate those who use SD cards as the OS drive).

 

[MunkyTOS]

Thanks for the quick reply Mpegger, I will relay the message to my coworkers and see if it helps our situation.

 

[deathman20]

I think its 1k-10k write cycles on most SD / MicroSD cards. Depends on the flash type used in it.
Data sitting and untouched I've seen life spans of data retention from 5-10 years per the manufacture of the card.

Edited: Sorry its was more....

 

[knoober]

All I can give is a little personal experience. I had a 64gb class 10 sd (Kingston maybe?) that I used in my phone. I artificially enabled a swap partition and set it to be on the sd card (If you dont know swap is the Linux equivalent of page file-- kind of). Apparently the reason swap is disabled on android systems is because of excessive read and write cycles. I used mine for several months and still have it, but it isnt in daily use anymore. From this experience I gather that a quality card will last for a fair amount of time, but if a term of years is expected then perhaps a different method ? YMMV