Editing From P2,... Absorbing card life?

M

MagicCat

Well-known member
Years ago a friend of mine laughed at me when I suggested the industry needed to move to Solid State Media for Editing and Acquisition. His thought train came from the simple fact that E Proms and or Memory could only support a limited amount of read/write actions before giving up for dead. At the time, he believed that due to the billions of times a computer would need to Read/Write to memory based storage, it would not last very long. He talked about Organic Memory, and once perfected, it would support the daily grind a computer would give to it. I dont know anything about Organic Memory, but, that isnt the point.

Obviously, 8 years later, his fear has come about un-realized. We all have SD cards, P2, Jump Drives, SSD Drives ETC ETC. However, there is some truth to his reaction back then. It is absolutely true, P2 cards will not last forever, neither will most other forms of static storage. (to my knowledge) But nothing like he thought.

Anyway, I thought about that conversation the other day when I was looking at some budget P2 cards. It occurred to me that if you edit directly from a P2 Card, you might actually be sucking the life out of it pre-maturely. (versus editing from footage offloaded to a hard drive) Am I correct here, or am I just being a little too cautious?.

Food for thought.
 
Last edited:
David Jimerson said:
It has never given me a moment's pause.
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Me neither, I guess that is why I brought it up for debate. It has always been my understanding that all static memory based storage has a life span expectancy, almost solely based on Read/Write usage. Kind of Like batteries, the more times you charge/discharge them, the shorter the will last) SSD drives have Data writing processes in place, to keep them working to a maximum, but they too will eventually become unusable, and most manufacturers are very well aware of this if you dig a little.

I have never had a Jump Drive, SD Card, ETC wear out, mainly because I probably don't use them often enough to even get the "hours meter" to register. However, I would be willing to bet if you stuck a Jump Drive in a computer and used it as a page file, or virtual memory for day to day use, (assuming you could deal with the painfully slow speed) you would find out pretty quick how long it would last.

This whole topic is probably a point 99% of people will never have to worry about, but it was something I thought might be worth bringing up.
 
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