Do Memory Cards Wear Out?

[Fleetwood271]

When I bought my Nikon D90 in January of 2010, it came with one 16GB SDHC memory card. It has always performed perfectly.

Recently, I was asked to shoot some photos for a friend and his girlfriend. I started thinking of all the things that could go wrong, and one thought I had was, "what if my memory card fails?

Got me to thinking...do memory cards have a life expectancy? I have used this same one since Jan of 2010. Never had a problem. But should I replace it soon? Any evidence out there that says cards fail after a certain of years, or after being formatted 200 times, or 500 times?

 

[subscuck]

I would assume they do. Remember the "floppies" we were using up until a couple of years ago? They were actually diskettes, floppy was the much older version, but I had a couple of them go bad from repeated writing and over writing. That said, I've never had one go bad, but I tend to rotate them in and out of service.

 

[chaosrealm93]

im sure like any other kind of medium, they will lose their memory over time. closest comparison i can think of is to an SSD used in computers.

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Nothing lasts forever, I keep two 8 gigs loaded in the D7000.

 

[480sparky]

All the more reason to have more than one memory card.

 

[NikonME]

SD Cards, and any other Flash memory device, has limited write cycles. Usually 100,000 write cycles and up.
SD Cards include wear-leveling circuitry to manage data writes to avoid spots where the data would wear out one spot faster than others.
You can contact your SD Card manufacturer to see what your specific cards' write cycle is rated at.

 

[NikonME]

All the more reason to have more than one memory card.

Exactly! Data storage is one area where being redundant is a good idea.

 

[KmH]

Yes! But! It's not likely to happen in your lifetime: Flash memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Memory wear

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of program-erase cycles (typically written as P/E cycles). Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 P/E cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[SUP][8][/SUP] Micron Technology and Sun Microsystems announced an SLC flash memory chip rated for 1,000,000 P/E cycles on December 17, 2008.[SUP][9][/SUP]

 

[480sparky]

Exactly! Data storage is one area where being redundant is a good idea.

I think I'm covered.

Four 2tb & one 1tb external drives, Eight 16g and eight 2g SD cards, one 2g MicroSD, one 8g thumb and one 1g SmartStick.

Not shown: one 2tb external & one 16g thumb drive stored 4 states away, and one 2g SD card in the D60.

 

[orb9220]

Yep they do have a write cycles life before problems arises. But I'm more concerned that you only have one card in the first place. Do you only have one battery also?

I wouldn't do an important shoot without extra battery and SD cards. As I heard Murphy likes to hang around those important moments kind of events and stick his nose in to muck things up.
.

 

[Fleetwood271]

Yep they do have a write cycles life before problems arises. But I'm more concerned that you only have one card in the first place. Do you only have one battery also?

I wouldn't do an important shoot without extra battery and SD cards. As I heard Murphy likes to hang around those important moments kind of events and stick his nose in to muck things up.
.

I actually have 3 - 16gb cards, 1 - 8gb card, and 1 - 4gb card. And also have 4 batteries.
It's just that I've never used any of the other cards. I shoot my pix, upload to my computer, backup to external drive, burn to CD, then format the card, and start shooting again.
Just never used any of my other cards.

 

[Garbz]

Yep they do have a write cycles life before problems arises. But I'm more concerned that you only have one card in the first place. Do you only have one battery also?

Do you have only one camera? How about one car to get to the shoot? There's little reason to be concerned these days with ultra redundancy. There's a multitude of components that are far more likely to fail than the memory card these days. The most likely thing that would affect the memory card is losing it which I get around by never removing.

Got me to thinking...do memory cards have a life expectancy? I have used this same one since Jan of 2010. Never had a problem. But should I replace it soon? Any evidence out there that says cards fail after a certain of years, or after being formatted 200 times, or 500 times?

So as someone has mentioned already the modern flash has a write expectancy of around 1 million read, write, erase cycles. Think of an SSD hard disk, same technology (Flash Memory). In really heavy services such as database servers they get thrashed 24 hours a day and don't fail. Yes they have wear leveling algorithms but they also get driven far harder than just taking a photo.

The modern flash not only lasts for 1 million cycles but there have been several independent tests done on a variety of Flash and EEPROM chips that determined this manufacturer rating is conservative by a factor of about 10. I still have my original cheap Chinese rip-off CF card from 4 years ago and it's still going hard 60k shots in, not to mention that while I was at uni I frequently used that same card for transferring data between equipment and files from uni to home. The card has been through the wash twice too.

Memory failure these days is not a credible concern. However it's worth noting that this was not always the case. Early flash memory had orders of magnitude shorter life, and combined with stupid writing system that updated the same section of the card everytime a picture was taken made them initially not quite as reliable as people wanted. This has given them a bad name amongst a lot of oldschool digital shooters (some of which here I'm sure would attest to failures).

Most failures are the result of a problem in the camera or memory card reader. Also failures happen while writing not while reading, so in nearly all cases data is recoverable. I would highly suggest that in maybe a year or two you buy another memory card, but do so because they have more capacity.


If it's data integrity you're after I suggest starting to look down at that box under your desk. Do you have a RAID1 harddisk configuration that could save you dataloss during a power surge? Do you make regular backups? Do you keep your backups off site to ensure if your house burns down you still have them? This stuff is something that is worth looking into far more than getting a second memory card just incase your highly reliable card ends up being incredibly unlucky enough to crap itself in a shoot.

Now if you're shooting a wedding take a second memory card for good measure, they are cheap and angry brides tend to sue

 

[NikonME]

I do have an 8gig card (microsd) that I purchased from Best Buy. I formatted it and used it in my cellphone for music and storing android apps. Not even 60 days later, while listening to music one of my songs didn't function. After checking the other songs there were several more that didn't work. I couldn't delete them either. I tried to format the card when I got home and the format functioned fine.

I reloaded the card and used it for 15 days and again files became corrupt. I figured there was a glitch with the phone's MP3 player, but when I tried to format again the card errored out. I tried several apps that repair worn drives and nothing worked. This probably has nothing to do with write cycles, but obviously there are different issues that can happen in production, packaging, etc.

Sh*t happens. Always have at least one spare card and battery.

 

[TiCoyote]

I use CF cards, and I just bought a new one. The package states that its life expectancy is 10,000 insertion/removal cycles. If you used it every day, it would last 30 years.

They do fail every so often, and a spare one isn't a bad idea, even for extra space.

 

[NikonME]

It matters whether the SSD drive uses SLC or MLC memory. SLC generally endures up to 100,000 write cycles or writes per cell, while MLC can endure anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 writes before it begins to fail.

This does not mean that the card be can formatted 100,000 times. It means that each cell can be written and erased (or over written) from 1,000 to 10,000 times for MLC memory and upto 100,000 times for SLC memory.

Each cell stores 512 bytes
1,000,000 bytes - 1 Megabyte
1,000,000 divided by 512 = 1953.125
1,954 cells are used for every 1 MB of use.

Let's say you take a picture as a high res jpg and it is 8 megs. That will use 13,672 cells. Now let's say you take 100 pictures, that's 195,313 cells used.

It is these cells that can written to 1,000 to 10,000 times (MLC) or upto 100,000 times (SLC).

Wear leveling will be the same cells from being written to unless the other cells have been written to already, so that you do not get a hotspot. Otherwise if each image, of each day, used the first 13,672 cells, those cells would use up their write-cycles quickly.

Hopefully that clears up basically how the SD card wearing works.