High Endurance microSDXC Cards

I remember reading that the BCDx36HP replay mode was potentially causing microSD card wear and errors.

Last year SanDisk and Transcend released high endurance microSDXC cards and they're GREAT!!! Not the fastest @ 20MB/s, but VERY reliable and cheap ($17 for 32GB). I have one in my BCD436HP, which doesn't take full advantage of the full USB speed anyways, so no worries on speed. I run replay now @ 240 seconds, 24/7.

I started using the high endurance cards on my phone and dashcam after a major failure which lost some important photos. Now that's all I'll buy. I'd rather have reliability and endurance over speed in most applications.

Transcend also makes GREAT cards and they're slightly cheaper.

Cheers

kk6cq said:

I remember reading that the BCDx36HP replay mode was potentially causing microSD card wear and errors.

Last year SanDisk and Transcend released high endurance microSDXC cards and they're GREAT!!! Not the fastest @ 20MB/s, but VERY reliable and cheap ($17 for 32GB). I have one in my BCD436HP, which doesn't take full advantage of the full USB speed anyways, so no worries on speed. I run replay now @ 240 seconds, 24/7.

I started using the high endurance cards on my phone and dashcam after a major failure which lost some important photos. Now that's all I'll buy. I'd rather have reliability and endurance over speed in most applications.

Transcend also makes GREAT cards and they're slightly cheaper.

Cheers

Click to expand...

Do you by chance have a link or part number for the "high endurance" SanDisk card you bought?
I'd love to compare specs against a standard high end SanDisk card and see what changed compared to their standard cards.
I'd guess the write count has greatly improved as writes are what usually causes a card to start failing when cells are blocked from use when they hit that limit.

I always figured someone would come out with a form of flash memory that has a much higher write limit per cell for SSD type drives as that is also what kills them eventually.

High Endurance microSDXC/SDHC-Memory Cards Durable. Reliable. Credible. high endurance memory card, microSDXC memory card, microSDHC memory card, class 10, extra durable


SanDisk High Endurance Video Monitoring Card with Adapter 32GB (SDSDQQ-032G-G46A) high endurance memory card, microSDXC memory card, microSDHC memory card, class 10, extra durable

it more important to ensure true random write to the card, always starting to write in block 326 will kill block 326 quickly, utilizing all the blocks is the imperative it's called wear leveling

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=142626

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/storage/best-microsd-card-best-microsd-cards-2016-3640745/

Thanks for the links.
Although not many specify how many writes a cell should handle before failure, one of the links did talk about the different types of flash memory and I think it was SLC that offered the most writes per cell. They did not give a specific number but it had claims that it could handle 50 times more writes compared to one of the other common types of flash ram.

I'm very familiar with wear leveling. That is of course very important, especially in devices like SSDs. For continuous security video recording where each cell is probably written equally, wear leveling is not as important unless you are stopping the recorder and deleting files often.

It would be neat if there were an diagnostic application that could show the write counts of cells or blocks of cells so you could see if your card was using wear leveling correctly.
I don't know of any utility that breaks down that info though. Some SSD manufacturers do have a utility that can show the total amount of data written to the drive but they don't tell you if a certain block of cells has a higher percentage of writes compared to other blocks.

Speed is not that important to me. As long as the card can handle the data flow without buffering the source, I'm happy.

I do like how they are giving an life rating for continuous video recording.
I can buy cards with a 12,000 hour claim for my security recorders and now have an idea of about when I should swap them with new cards.
I've had quality name brand cards fail before in our security recorders. When I'd need to playback a time period, no video as the card had failed.
I blame some of that on the recorders as well as they should have a method of checking that writes were successful every so often and if not, a warning message should show up on the monitor that the card is failing and an alarm on the recorder for those that don't watch the video being recorded. Our recorders are dated now so that is a feature I'll look for when we start swapping them out with new.

darunimal said:

High Endurance microSDXC/SDHC-Memory Cards Durable. Reliable. Credible. high endurance memory card, microSDXC memory card, microSDHC memory card, class 10, extra durable


SanDisk High Endurance Video Monitoring Card with Adapter 32GB (SDSDQQ-032G-G46A) high endurance memory card, microSDXC memory card, microSDHC memory card, class 10, extra durable

it more important to ensure true random write to the card, always starting to write in block 326 will kill block 326 quickly, utilizing all the blocks is the imperative it's called wear leveling

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=142626

Best microSD card | Best microSD cards 2016 - Test Centre - PC Advisor

Click to expand...

Wear leveling is good, but there are also different physical technologies. IIRC Some of the Intel SSDs are literally rated for 10x more write cycles than the more common ones--and a much steeper price increase. The materials used in the actual chips are different, as well as how they are designed.

Given the way memory prices keep falling and performance improving, it might just be worth using the cheaper chips and tossing them on a schedule.

delete original comment
You were correct but SLC memory is very very expensive and is used Industrially