blueman541

joined 2 years ago
[–] blueman541@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

Do SD cards go bad?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: Here are ways cards exhibit failure. Might be completely or partial.

  1. Physical damage from wear, heat, mfg flaw, water, blunt force & static electricity.
  2. File corruption occur with camera or pin contact issue.
  3. Write cycle lifespan

SD cards are made of NAND flash chip which have different levels of write endurance depending which technology is used.

  • SLC 100K write cycles
  • MLC 10K
  • TLC 3K
  • QLC 1K

Example: Samsung STD or EVO card uses TLC chips making them super cheap and attractive to consumer. While their more expensive PRO card uses MLC that fewer people buy.

Most cards sold are TLC NAND with 3,000x write cycles. However, that is not a minimum cycle before failure but actually "MTBF". In other words 3K on average. It could survive much longer or fail sooner. All based on probability aka luck.

Lets be conservative assuming TLC will 90% survive 1K writes. If you fill up the card every day for work etc it will last about 3-years before you should think about replacing.

 

Do I need a new sd card?

SD cards are cheap. Your a PRO working for money. I would get replacement just in case but better yet a dual card camera.