Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right Samsung has dished up a new variety of SD card that can, it claims, sustain 16 years of continual writes. The Korean giant's calculations for the longevity of the PRO Endurance Memory Card – for that is the new tech's name – assume their use to record 1920×1080 video content at 26Mbit/sec (3.25MB/sec). At that rate, the 256GB …
I know I know, it would have been more respectful* of me to email the correction. However, I made my post in the spirit of chuckling with the editor at a human oversight we're all capable of making, not laughing at them.
*Respect. Which is of course a cherished Vulture value. (Albeit a value that occasionally has a minus sign in front of it)
Where as I leave it on the windscreen all year round, however I opted for one which had a capacitor rather than a battery (Viofo a129 for myself currently which with Covid is at least 3 years old).
My first dash cam the battery did puff up, still worked although I cut the battery out until I replaced it.
However the other failures were actually the camera sensors (Where the recordings would start to have blank spots), I also had those on 24/7 as at the time I parked in the road.
We've got Mobotix M10 CCTV cameras on our walls at school that have been there for about 15 years, they've still got the same 2gb SD cards on board that from the day they were installed.
They were all working last Friday when I had to search the cards for an incident that lunchtime...
My dashcam has a basic 32GB Class 10 uSD card, I think it might be Verbatim.
My dashcam writes some weird incarnation of MJPEG, managing to dump around 300GB/minute.
It's been going for three years now.
I have to periodically reformat the card because the part that is on the way out is the little battery that allows the camera to shut itself down cleanly. So, yeah, the card has coped with hundreds (if not thousands) of gigabytes being written nonstop (when in use, including that night I forgot to turn it off!) and has outlasted the little internal Lipo cell... And that's just a regular domestic thing bought in a supermarket.
Yeah, my bad. Autocorrect decided I meant gigabytes and I didn't notice until I looked at My Posts and thought "somebody will have noticed". ;)
Still, 300 megs a minute is pretty poor. That said, it's 5MB per second, and if a frame rate of 25fps, it's about 200KB or so per image. Freaky how quickly it adds up.
I thought that was an odd spec too. It ought to survive a fall from any altitude as it will not reach a high enough speed to damage it even on concrete. I have just lobbed a couple of SD cards out of the second floor window and you would never know.
For a good manufacturer, this would mean that it survives the thing it's in falling five meters, where it doesn't get to have any air resistance and has a lot more momentum conserved through it. I'm guessing that's not what they meant, especially as calculating exactly how much stress the card took is tricky because every device will have a different impact.
" if you drop a tonne of bowling balls and a tonne of SD cards they will hit the ground at he same time"
Only in a vacuum or if the SD cards are bound up in a large 1-tonne package, yes. If it's 1000kg of SD cards (at 2 g each that's 1/2 million of them!!!) that are just dumped loosely they will have a lot of air resistance and will hit the ground after the bowling balls
Samsung has sold "Pro Endurance" cards for some time here in Canada at least (see amazon.ca). The 128 Gbyte card is rated for 5 years of writes, so with this new improved technology that would presumably be 8 years. Is Samsung just announcing slightly improved technology under the same "Pro Endurance" name?
Floppies were still a thing. I built a WinBox which had a floppy drive specifically to load certain drivers on installing XP, particularly the drivers for the optical drive, which for some reason didn’t ship on CD.
Hell, optical drives were still a thing. When was the last time that you saw either a floppy or an optical drive on a new laptop? Looks at BluRay burner attached to laptop via _two_ USB plugs…
"When was the last time that you saw either a floppy or an optical drive on a new laptop?"
Floppy: it's been a long time. Optical: last year. A few large laptops still include them. I avoided those models as it's a lot of weight for a feature I'll use once a year. I understand that there are people who use them more often, but for the rate I use them, a USB one is fine. I'd prefer another drive bay, larger battery, or just a smaller laptop.
About 6 years ago I was looking for a new case for my home PC, and spent ages finding one that had all the features I wanted, the most tricky being a 5.25" bay for an optical drive, as they were already being phased out then.
Since then I've used the optical drive about ten times, and I would have saved myself quite a bit of time (and money) by getting a different case and a USB optical drive.
Still amuses me how they can claim such a life for something that has just been developed..I mean like how can they really know*
* yeah I know, simulated testing and all that but still...............
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