Unlike the hard disk, flash memory has a limit, albeit a high one, on how many times it can be written to. Directly related, did you know every time you take a picture with your digital camera, several write operations are performed on you memory card?
While digital camera writes are normal operations, there are a few things you can do to keep the number of write operations performed on you flash cards down:
- Try to use flash memory cards only for storing data, but never modifying it. For example, if you edit pictures or music files, copy the file to your hard disk, do your changes and then write it back to your memory card.
- Delete the data on the flash card only if the storage medium is filled up and cannot store new data anymore. This ensures write operations are performed on different sectors and not the same sectors over and over again.
While it is not essential to follow the above tips (flash memory is pretty cheap), it is just something to keep in mind to help preserve the life of your memory card.
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The second tip is not usefull and even not true, since the SD- and MMD-controllers take care for spreading the writing.
What is the actual life of these cards? That is, how many write cycles? I have heard about this many times but never a hard number. If it is in the thousands I don’t really care much. The card will become obsolete (in terms of capacity) long before that. My oldest SD card is 128 MB and I rarely use it anymore but it still works like new. I progressively doubled up capacity with newer cards and my newest card is 2GB. The 1 GB card I use the most is just one year old and before long the 2 GB card will probably take its place.
This tip should go for all flash memory card types, not just SD and MMC. Or am I wrong?