How long does an SD card last for

[Thready]

I have some critical photography ($3,000 gig) coming up and I use a dual slot A7III camera, and I have 4 64GB memory cards, and I'll be using 2 at a time, but they're all about a year old and I've used them casually, writing and deleting maybe 20 GB per month on them.

 

How many write cycles would a brand name Samsung SD card last through? Online said about 100,000 cycles but I'm not sure I believe that. I figured computer people would know better than photographers.

[da na]

A lot. A whole lot. More than you would expect. Had a 128gb card die 2 weeks ago that had been reading/writing 24/7 for about 3 years as the boot drive of a Raspberry Pi. Your card is fine. Will probably last several more years at least.

[VectorTech]

I've been using the same 64GB SD card for about 6 years now for photography and it has yet to falter. It'll be gucci.

[manikyath]

if you're worried about the lifespan of SD cards, you should just get more SD cards.

 

but really.. i've installed full desktop operating systems on SD cards before, and it was *fine*... i'd be more worried about accidents (breaking the card) than about the card's lifespan.

[Electronics Wizardy]

One thing id do to help reliability is to format the cards in camera before the shoot. Shooting then deleing can cause issues over time.

 

 

A quality card should easily last 1 year of casual use. But thats why you got 2 copies.

[kirashi]

51 minutes ago, Thready said:

I have some critical photography ($3,000 gig) coming up and I use a dual slot A7III camera, and I have 4 64GB memory cards, and I'll be using 2 at a time, but they're all about a year old and I've used them casually, writing and deleting maybe 20 GB per month on them.

 

How many write cycles would a brand name Samsung SD card last through? Online said about 100,000 cycles but I'm not sure I believe that. I figured computer people would know better than photographers.

Like any storage medium, SD Cards can fail at any time. The best defense for this is to ensure you always have at minimum 2 (if not 3) copies of irreplaceable data at all times. That being said, I've got SD cards from 10+ years ago that have either been heavily used or not plugged into a powered device in years that all still work just fine. Most people don't use flash media long or hard enough to experience failures, though that depends on the quality of the media of course.

[badreg]

I have never once had a catastrophic failure of a memory card over the course of my 15 year career as a photographer. I have heard countless stories of card failures, but no first hand experience, so by this point, I attribute most of those stories to user error.

 

I have old Sandisk CF cards that are 15 years old that are still going strong. I have no issues using them for critical projects.

 

Obviously, do what makes you comfortable, but using dual cards that are a year old will not be an issue. The camera will alert you if either card has a write error, and it is orders of magnitude more likely that you physically lose the cards than both failing simultaneously.

[Zodiark1593]

I’ve only ever had two card failures. One was a 1 GB Patriot Micro SD card that was in a three-pack. The other was a Panasonic 16 MB SD card that cane with my Kyocera camera, and probably only because I hadn’t touched it in a decade. 

[Thready]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

[whispous]

I've had a bunch of SD cards fail over a few years, but each time they turned out to be fakes from amazon under the official listing.

 

If you've already found them to work well, they're good ones.

[Thready]

On 8/10/2021 at 10:33 AM, whispous said:

I've had a bunch of SD cards fail over a few years, but each time they turned out to be fakes from amazon under the official listing.

 

If you've already found them to work well, they're good ones.

ohhhh crap how do I tell? I just look at the stars of both the product and seller

[whispous]

10 hours ago, Thready said:

ohhhh crap how do I tell? I just look at the stars of both the product and seller

Given i've got them from amazon FROM THE OFFICIAL PRODUCT PAGE (!) amazon just sent me a refund each time without any quibble.