It depends on the storage medium. SD cards will fail if you use them enough. Photographers and videographers will run into to problem every once in a while, especially if they’re a professional. Why SD cards in particular have a tendency to fail, I can’t exactly say. It might just be their form factor making internal physical damage more likely. I say internal, because the issue is that a normal looking SD card will one day turn up corrupted for no obvious reason.
I haven’t heard of any other type of flash memory having lifespan issues for regular consumers.
Yeah it’s at the level of frequency where an ordinary user with one SD card is unlikely to have a problem, but if photography is your hobby it’s only a matter of time. In a rather informal poll conducted by Chelsea and Tony Northrup, they basically found that two thirds of the most active photographers had experienced at least one SD card failure. It basically was just a direct correlation with how many photographs you’ve taken.
Yeah but the practical write limit tests I’ve seen for SSDs (from ten years ago) put it well beyond what even a professional photographer would do. We’re talking SSDs that sustained constant writing of random data 24/7 and didn’t fail for more than a year. There’s just something about SD cards. As further “proof,” photographers don’t complain about their SSDs failing on them, even though those should have more write cycles than their SD cards.
SD cards don’t perform wear leveling while ssds do. This is why there are specific SD cards meant for surveillance cameras. They have additional wear levelling circuitry at the expense of speed.
So photographers who fill up their sd cards end up writing over the same spots repeatedly and wear them out.
No shit? Well today I learned. That’s definitely going to reduce lifespan. I guess that means you should try to fill your card as much as possible before formatting it.
Not a whole lot to share. Phone was unstable for a bit and one day refused to boot past a blank screen. As far as I could tell from trying to pull data off it, something got corrupted and it could no longer boot but my data was all encrypted with no way to pull it off.
I have seen multiple (quality) SSDs with unrecoverable read errors after a few years. All of them had plenty of spare area left. Maybe some kind of retention issue?
The UFS storage inside an Android smartphone is basically an SSD. Both use flash memory, so it’s reasonable to expect that they have similar failure modes. But I’m not sure if you could diagnose such a failure on Android.
Care to share details?
It depends on the storage medium. SD cards will fail if you use them enough. Photographers and videographers will run into to problem every once in a while, especially if they’re a professional. Why SD cards in particular have a tendency to fail, I can’t exactly say. It might just be their form factor making internal physical damage more likely. I say internal, because the issue is that a normal looking SD card will one day turn up corrupted for no obvious reason.
I haven’t heard of any other type of flash memory having lifespan issues for regular consumers.
I’ve used the same microsd for years. Granted it isn’t heavily used.
Yeah it’s at the level of frequency where an ordinary user with one SD card is unlikely to have a problem, but if photography is your hobby it’s only a matter of time. In a rather informal poll conducted by Chelsea and Tony Northrup, they basically found that two thirds of the most active photographers had experienced at least one SD card failure. It basically was just a direct correlation with how many photographs you’ve taken.
Flash has a limited number of writes so that makes sense
Yeah but the practical write limit tests I’ve seen for SSDs (from ten years ago) put it well beyond what even a professional photographer would do. We’re talking SSDs that sustained constant writing of random data 24/7 and didn’t fail for more than a year. There’s just something about SD cards. As further “proof,” photographers don’t complain about their SSDs failing on them, even though those should have more write cycles than their SD cards.
SD cards don’t perform wear leveling while ssds do. This is why there are specific SD cards meant for surveillance cameras. They have additional wear levelling circuitry at the expense of speed.
So photographers who fill up their sd cards end up writing over the same spots repeatedly and wear them out.
No shit? Well today I learned. That’s definitely going to reduce lifespan. I guess that means you should try to fill your card as much as possible before formatting it.
Not a whole lot to share. Phone was unstable for a bit and one day refused to boot past a blank screen. As far as I could tell from trying to pull data off it, something got corrupted and it could no longer boot but my data was all encrypted with no way to pull it off.
I have seen multiple (quality) SSDs with unrecoverable read errors after a few years. All of them had plenty of spare area left. Maybe some kind of retention issue?
How does that apply to android?
The UFS storage inside an Android smartphone is basically an SSD. Both use flash memory, so it’s reasonable to expect that they have similar failure modes. But I’m not sure if you could diagnose such a failure on Android.