Do SD cards wear out?

A

ASchear

Well-known member
Recently, some of my SD card fleet has become a bit unreliable. I only purchase SanDisk Ultra class 10 cards (was using 8x 16GB cards, all 30MB/s), so I thought I would be safe from this type of issue. I use the SD cards in three different cameras: Panasonic G6, GH3, and GH2. Over time, I noticed that it would take slightly longer to "stop recording." Then there was an instance of the camera freezing up, requiring a battery pull to get it going again (this later happned twice more). At the time, I was relying on the G6 for a lot of my shooting, so I was convinced the camera was at fault, since that camera is more aimed at consumers. However, when the issue began to appear in my GH2 and GH3 (got a "recording stopped due to write speed limitations of memory card" error on the unhacked GH2), I tested my 16GB SD cards vs a new 32GB SD card of the same brand and class, and found the cards to be the issue.

I have had these cards for approximately 2-3 years and have formatted before shooting each time (I would estimate 100-200 times). One of my friends in IT informed me that formatting wears out SD cards faster and recommended that I simply delete the video files manually and not format. However, this goes against what I've read on this forum in the past which is to format every time I put the card in the camera. I'd love to know more about this topic because while I was lucky this time not to lose too many recordings this time, I may not be so lucky if the cards wear out again. I would like to add that I don't mind purchasing new SD cards every year or two if that's the most reliable way to make sure things go smoothly. The cost of the SD cards is peanuts compared to the work being recorded on them.

Many online resources I found say that cards wear out after 10,000 write cycles, and I don't believe I was anywhere near that, which is why I'm asking you guys!
 
why ask videographers? You would be better asking on an electronics forum.

The short answer is yes ALL flash memory wears out, This is why there is wear levelling technology in SD and CF cards to even out the sectors used. The nominal number of write cycles is 10,000 though in reality on good units it will be much higher. Other factors are temperature. Performance can fall off at the extremes though unless you are at the North pole, up Everest or K2 it is not likely to be a problem.

If you format every time you use the cards it is a couple of writes across the whole card. Though even with the minimum life of 10K writes it is going to be negligible use. Worst case 250 formats + 250 uses is still less than 5% of the life of the card

The problem is that whilst Sandisk, Lexar etc do use high quality flash there re a hell of a lot of counterfeit cards about. These will have faulty or second grade flash in them. They may become intermittent from the start or after only a little use. So in addition to using a good quality make of cards get them from a reputable source.
 
ASchear said:
Many online resources I found say that cards wear out after 10,000 write cycles, and I don't believe I was anywhere near that, which is why I'm asking you guys!
Click to expand...

There may be more 'writing' than meets the eye... but only during the early adoption period, did I 'reuse' flash media. Once SD cards came into wide, reasonably 'cheap' use, I've pretty much shot once and never reused the card again for capture... just like a roll of film...
 
On a still photo forum I frequent, I've seen it recommend many times to LOW LEVEL FORMAT your SD cards(this would apply to any card really, but most cameras don't give you the option except on SD. You'd have to do it on a computer), because it supposedly erases everything, all the memory blocks, not just the directory saying it's OK to write to the memory blocks again. That's where the performance hit comes from, the camera is having to erase the block BEFORE it writes anything to it while you're recording.

And yes, all memory cards will eventually wear out, but I bet there's a good chance that if you do a low-level format on your cards the original performance(or close to it) will return.
 
Yes, they wear out.

Flash media tolerates some very large number of write cycles per sector before bad sectors will begin to develop. The recommendation that "formatting is bad" stems from the thought that the card will still write sequentially to later sectors without a format, and formatting begins the card writing over at the first sectors again.

UHS-1 cards write differently (they don't write to the same first few sectors over and over and over) and as such have better durability.

I've re-used some cards multiple times weekly for... heck, going on 3 years. No problems (Panasonic 8GB Class 10). In those same 3 years, I've had two cards get that "failed due to write speed..." error soon after purchase (Transcend 16GB UHS-1, SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB) despite not even challenging them with a hacked bit rate. So yes, usually the card is the problem. I have no problem whatsoever re-using an SD card, but will pitch it at the first sign of imperfection.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top