In the next year or so I am expecting a lot of flash cart users who frequently use our DS day to day will experience glitches and failures due to our SD cards reaching the end of their life.
Most manufacturers state Micro SD memory has a lifespan of 10,000 write cycles. In a camera or other recording device this could take 10 or more years as the cards are sequentially filled instead of being constantly overwritten in the one spot. At most this would be once or twice a day or around about 500 writes a year, for a very heavily used camera.
The way we use the SD cards in our DS this could be a lot shorter. With the operating systems constantly writing to configuration files, SD caching and users constantly overwriting saves, our cards could be pushed past the manufacturers life expectancy in around 2 years with heavy use. How long they continue to function error free after that time is anyone’s guess, it would most likely depend on the quality of the particular card.
I’m not sure how much internal error checking and isolating of bad memory (marking bad sectors???) these cards are capable of.
It might be something to bear in mind when posts start talking about glitches in this or hangs in that. Re-formatting may solve the problem temporarily but like a bad sector on a hard drive you may just end up placing another piece of data into the sketchy memory location resulting in another function or ROM falling over.
Most manufacturers state Micro SD memory has a lifespan of 10,000 write cycles. In a camera or other recording device this could take 10 or more years as the cards are sequentially filled instead of being constantly overwritten in the one spot. At most this would be once or twice a day or around about 500 writes a year, for a very heavily used camera.
The way we use the SD cards in our DS this could be a lot shorter. With the operating systems constantly writing to configuration files, SD caching and users constantly overwriting saves, our cards could be pushed past the manufacturers life expectancy in around 2 years with heavy use. How long they continue to function error free after that time is anyone’s guess, it would most likely depend on the quality of the particular card.
I’m not sure how much internal error checking and isolating of bad memory (marking bad sectors???) these cards are capable of.
It might be something to bear in mind when posts start talking about glitches in this or hangs in that. Re-formatting may solve the problem temporarily but like a bad sector on a hard drive you may just end up placing another piece of data into the sketchy memory location resulting in another function or ROM falling over.