how old are my SD Cards?

[tired]

I have a large number of SD cards from 32 to 256Gb and just looking at ordering a few more. I always use Sandisk extreme pro but I'm not sure how 'old' some of my existing cards are. I may have some 64Gb that are 5 years old or maybe more - does anyone know of a way of telling the age or number of hours use on an SD card?

 

[Paul F]

The date of manufacture is on the SD card in the CID. You can read the CID if you have a computer with an SD card slot. A USB port won't work. Do a search on Read SD Card CID.

The age of the card doesn't matter much, but usage does. There is very little out there about how many write cycles an SD card can take, but from what I read, a minimum of 1000 writes and perhaps as many as 10,000 writes are the life of an SD card.

As a side note, never use SD as a archiving storage media. They do lose their data over time.

 

[tired]

that sound like a solution but I can only find some code in Linux that will read the CID - there appears to be nothing for windows which seems odd. I would have thought a utility that could read the CID and tell the age of a card would be useful, much like the hours on a camera.

 

[Paul F]

I'd say the date of manufacture is more of a curiosity than useful data. I've tried to find some technical papers from a manufacturer or university about SD life, but no luck. I looked at a Samsung data sheet and it makes no mention of life cycles as this is something they can't guarantee. When I was in the business of using FLASH on products that had a warranty of 10 years, we just had to eat it when our customers boards failed. We had no way to tell them when this would happen. We did a lot of work to minimize writes to the FLASH to extend the life of the chips.