P2 Card Short Lifespan?

Status
Not open for further replies.
bbalser

bbalser

Veteran
On VideoUniversity.com's boards, someone claims that, well, let me just copy and paste it.

"Check out the camera forum on dv.com. Suggestions that P2 cards wear themselves and the camera memory slots out in 3 months of hard use. Ouch! "

Come on, 3 months? That simply defies logic, correct?
 
That is the most retarded thing I've heard lately. I mean if you are kicking the P2 cards back into the camera with your foot. Then maybe you might wear it out. If that crazy logic was correct then my Digital SLR would have failed on me a long time ago. I know that they're different cards but its still the same idea.
 
There's no "logic" about it. It's either fact or not, and to be fact there has to be evidence. Where is it?
 
Flash memory does have a limit on the number of wire cycles, it is some form of chemical process, however I think we'll all be long dead before P2 cards wear out. The same limitation applies to all flash memory devices and so far no one sees that as a deal breaker.

What could be more of a worry is the physical contacts in both the cards and the camera. Keeping things clean and dry would be a good move. Even with gold plating you can get problems with tiny contacts. Gold plating can be very porous letting moisture and oxygen into the base metal leading to corrosion. ALso gold is soft and repeated cycling of the connectors can wear the gold off. This is minimised by using matching hardness levels for both plug and socket. This requires good QA. Can become a problem when manufacturers start to cut corners, could be an issue when you start using non Panny slots to plug the P2 cards into i.e. laptop connectors. Mostly I'd doubt laptop PCMCIA slots are designed with that level of cycling in mind.
 
Pretty much from Panasonic themsleves. Yonks ago when I sat through the P2 presentation they kept restating the point that the P2 cards were part of the camera, they did not want people thinking of them as removable media like tape was. So much so that they were refusing to say what the P2 cards cost without you being ushered into a back room after signing a NDA.

The camera they were demoing held I think 5 P2 cards. Basic concept for ENG was P2 cards could either stay in the camera and data was downloaded from the camera or else cards were swapped to get the van / camera back on the road. That's a lot less wear and tear on the contacts than the current cycle rates with the HVX 200.
 
"P2 life span is listed by Panasonic as "insert and remove tests show its connector will last for a minimum of 30,000 insertion and removal cycles and the P2 card can be rewritten a minimum of 100,000 times without performance degradation". That's four times to use the card once (pull out of camera, insert in computer, pull out of computer, plug back into camera). At 8 minutes a run you insert and remove 4 times or 64 times an hour. Or 512 times a day for 8 hours of shooting. 2560 a week. 10240 a month. In a little under three months you have gone beyond the life expectancy of a P2 card. Whoops! Tape still is more reliable. I use it once and store it and don't have to spend more money trying to find a reliable way of storing P2 data after I have pushed and pulled all day to the point that I have pee-two tunnel syndrome. Or said another way performance will give you 10 months or reliable recording before the cards possibly start going south. "
 
From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this:

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%



and
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it's the BULLSHIT

and Ass kissing that will put

you over the top.
 
I remember looking at the thread and point out the basic error in the math...

The person who came up with the 3 1/2 month life assumed that one was inserting and removing the P2 card in less than 60 seconds. (Given that the 4GB card runs for 4 minutes and the 8 GB card runs for 8 minutes that the maximum data rate, WHY would you insert and remove a card that often?)

Let's look at the numbers... ASSUME that you job is to insert a P2 card, let it fill, then dump it into a computer (another insert), and last of all back to the camera for another fill... We will assume that for 48 hours per week, you swap cards back and forth, recording endlessly. (Who the heck would do this, I don't know, but this does make for a worst case example.)

With 8 GB cards, every 8 minutes, another insert occurs; 8 minutes record, 8 minutes dump, 8 minutes another record, ... That comes to 7.5 inserts per hour or 60 inserts per day.

We will assume that you work 6 days of the week doing this (and if you do, your job must really suck); that comes to 360 inserts per week. With 52 weeks per year, that comes to 18,720 inserts per year. We have not reached the limit of 30,000 inserts yet. Nope, you have to do this for around 1.6 years before the card reaches the 30,000 limit OR you go crazy inserting and removing cards!!!
:kali::badputer:


Let's use more reasonable numbers, assume you work 5 days of the week and get 2 weeks off every year. 5 days x 50 weeks = 250 work days per year.

Assume that we record 80 minutes of footage per day on one card. That comes to 10 inserts in the HVX and another 10 in the computer; thus 20 inserts per day. 250 work days per wear x 20 inserts per day = 5,000 inserts per year. Do this for 6 years and we reach the 30,000 insert mark. After having recording 4,000 hours of footage on the card, you may want to replace the 8 GB P2 card with a larger card, which will reduce the number of inserts you need to do every day...


Bob Diaz
 
Obviously someone is looking at the math and it is pretty easy to get up to 30000 cycles but most cards will not get this much use in a year let alone 3 months. However Panasonic better hope that the cards don't fall short of their rated cycles very often before they come out with bigger versions of the cards which will have the same cycle rate. Also who pays for the new slot in your computer which might not last the 30000 cycles?
 
Yes, my concern is the CAMERA - with the more fragile "male" pins on the connector. But I'm not really too worried. The mechanism seems pretty solid. But do Panny's numbers apply to card or camera?
 
Really those numbers should apply to both. An interconection system is just that, a system. If the properties of either the plug or socket contacts don't match that's when the problems arise.
One of your biggest enemies with such small contacts and low volatges is grit, wear the gold plating off and things can get nasty, bend a pin in the camera and you're really in trouble. All those figures are best case, oftenly only for a controlled environment.
So you need to keep your environment as close to ideal as possible and it's not that hard, keep the cards either in the camera or in a protective case, the sockets on the P2 cards like any PCMCIA device are great grot traps and once it's in there it could be very hard to get out and it'll damage both the plug and the socket. This is no different to getting crud on a tape, it'll ruin the tape and possibly the heads but gold contacts are no where near as hard as video heads.

Pockets can be a real no no too, have a look in the bottom of the average pocket, what looks like harmless fluff can also trap very small particles that are very abrasive.

Also needless to saying cooking P2 cards by leaving them in the sun isn't going to help their life.

All this stuff is pretty much common sense.
 
We're shooting with the SPX-800s. We've been using 7 or them for nearly 9 months now, added 7 more a couple of months ago. They are used for news gathering. The cards are shot on, pulled from the cameras, plugged into laptops and readers and passed around...not a problem with a card or camera yet. (did have a camera go to the bottom of a lake...the P2 cards stayed dry and the video was saved...after sitting around drying for several months the camera has come back to life too!)
 
The thread on Video University's forum was Douglas Spotted Eagle and some yahoo just bashing the hell out of the whole P2 and HVX200 system. I attended the 4EVER Group convention Jan '06 and he was there trashing Panasonic left and right. He was just playing word games, not really basing it on solid facts. Made me lose a great deal of respect for him. I expected much more from a so called seasoned professional.

But then, the wedding and event videography field is full of wackos. Full of nice folks, too. I got my start in business doing it. But since I left it behind and moved on, I've found much more educated folks who work on a much more professional level.

The HVX200 is getting trashed a lot by the wedding/event field. They just can't see doing a one hour wedding non-stop with P2 cards. And none of them trust hard drive systems such as the FS-100 or Cineporter, as they say drives crash all the time.

I ask you, how often does the hard drive in your iPod crash? How often does th hard drive in laptops crash? Not very...
 
BenB said:
I ask you, how often does the hard drive in your iPod crash? How often does th hard drive in laptops crash? Not very...
Click to expand...

Everyones experiences are different. I have had maybe 30-40 hard drives pass through my systems in the last 10 years. I have had at least 8 die completely in a spontaneous fashion. Lost all that was on them. In addition I have had to recover data off of several laptop drives that died. So lets say 10-11 drives gone bad out of 30-40 in 10 years. That is a pretty bad ratio. (note some drives were 2 weeks old...others 2 years old.....they can fail anytime!)

On the other hand I have cataloged 200+ tapes in that same time. I have had maybe 2-3 that got eaten up in a camera or deck. I was always able to salvage those and only lose the footage that was located on the bad part of the tape. It aggravated me but it is better to have 95% of your footage still there than 0% which is what happened when my drives went. In addition to this I have had 2-3 tapes that had some weird dropouts on them in a few sparse areas.

To me tape has been reliable as can be and allows for a really cheap backup method.

Oh....and one other thing about hard drives......in my experience a drive doesn't have to fail to lose critical data. Sometimes for no good reason a bit or byte gets shuffled or messed up and that can render an entire .avi unreadable. It's happened numerous time. The file is on the hard drive....it is intact and running properly but you get errors saying the files is corrupt and damaged or something.

I like hard drives but I wouldn't trust em to hold valuable data that I did not have backed up on some other more reliable media.

Of course my entire diatribe above is not talking about DVCPRO-HD vs. HDV. I am simply comparing the storage medium of Hard drive vx. Tape. SO please no flames about the recording formats.
 
I've lost more tapes in 2 years than I've lost hard drives in the 18 years that I've been around computers. And I've lost zero flash drives for any of my mp3 players and digital cameras, where I've again lost many more tapes. And often the tapes were just sitting on a shelf. I remember hearing discussions about the best angle to store tapes, on which side facing which cardinal direction then re-allocating for the change of season...

But I guess my point is, people are always very resistant to new ideas. Especially if it threatens their most recent investment. No one wants to look like a moron. The more astutely someone tries to fight something, it's usually the more they feel threatened by that which they attack. It's easier to condemn that which you don't understand than to try and understand.
 
Can you define "lost" tapes? What the heck happens to them?

By the way. I am not resistant to change myself... I have an HVX200 and P2 cards. I love the concept. But....in reality I feel that storing your only copy of critical data on a hard drive is risky. I have been burnt so many times with DV files that HD files are even more at risk (because of the massive space they take up). At least with DV I could go back to the original tape and start over. It was a bonus.

All your post really points out is everyone has different experiences. Mine has been "Hard drives die way too often"......but others may vary.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top