Durability of flash memory cards

/ A COUPLE have been reunited with pictures from a camera they dropped overboard on an Atlantic cruise, thanks to an Oxfordshire woman.

South Africans Barbara and Dennis Gregory were en route from New York to Southampton on the Queen Mary 2 in 2008 when they dropped their camera in the ocean.

But 16 months later Spanish fisherman Benito Estevez found the camera in his nets with the photos still on the memory card. /

Mrs Gregory, 53, said: "I remember the camera getting lost. We were about a day out from Southampton sitting on deck when somebody shouted out there were dolphins.

"We jumped up and rushed to the side and it happened - Dennis didn't have the camera strapped round his neck and it slipped out of his hands.

"It literally bounced off his lap, across the deck and into the water with hardly a splash and it was gone. /

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Reply to
N_Cook
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That's interesting. I haven't had an SD card fail that I recall. Still have a 32 megabyte SD card in my Palm Tungsten and a 512 in a camera I bought back in 2003.

Reply to
Meat Plow

How do you define "failure"? Malfunction after abuse? A well-sealed card might continue to operate even after a salt-water dunking, and a poorly-sealed card after same, followed by a thorough rinsing in fresh water (then by a drying).

Of course, the memory cells can only be written to and erased a finite number of times. Each card supposedly has its own internal OS that handles "leveling" -- seeing to it that the cells are written to and erased evenly. Even so, I let my camera cards fill up before transferring their contents to a hard drive or Zip disk. Then I erase and reformat the card.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

Failure as in failing to write to or read data from or for the card to be recognized.

Reply to
Meat Plow

Interesting that you reuse the cards. Although I transfer my images to the computer for display and manipulation, I let my SD cards fill right up, and then just archive them. They thus become the electronic equivalent of all my old 'negs' from when I used a 35mm SLR. SD cards are now so cheap that it seems pointless to reuse them, when they can serve as the primary backup for all of your photos.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

I reuse mine also. However with a 4 gig card I can take 600 -

3648x2736 (10MP) photos. Or an hour of HQ 25FPS video. Hell I don't know if I've even taken 600 photos with this camera in the 3 years I've had it :)

One thing that I won't do with my SD cards is reformat them. I don't see any need for it if nothing is wrong. I did howerver repartition a

1 gig card to 512 mb for my old 5MP camera that cannot use a card above 512. Worked like a charm using Acronis Disk Director.
Reply to
Meat Plow

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