Q&A: How Long Do Memory Cards Last?
A while back in the newsletter, you referred to a "dead" removable media card. Is this really possible? I was under the impression you could take 10 million photos with a flash card. Do they have a specific lifetime?
--John Borth, Akron
Good eye, John. Flash memory cards are generally pretty resilient. Nailing down their lifespan can sometimes be a bit perplexing. You are correct: Modern flash memory is usually rated for tens of millions of read/write operations, which means that most people will never take a memory card right to the end of its life in ordinary operation. But that's not the only way to kill a memory card.
It's always possible, for instance, to purchase a card with a manufacturing defect. Though rare, it happens--and that can cause your memory card to fail after a relatively short time. I have personally owned a 256MB CompactFlash card which died just a few months after purchase. Thankfully, bad cards almost always fail early enough in their lifespan that they're still under warranty--so save your receipts.
Rough usage can also kill a card; but it's not nearly as easy as you might think. To see just how tolerant a typical flash memory card is, I took an old Lexar 64MB CompactFlash card and ran it through the washing machine--it's possible, after all, to accidentally forget to remove it from a pocket. After letting it dry thoroughly for about three days after retrieving it from the washer, it worked like a charm. (If your own memory card finds its way into the wash, do like I did and give it plenty of time to dry. Don't ever try to use a memory card that might possibly still have moisture inside.) I then tried a drop test, letting it fall onto a hardwood floor from three and then six feet. It survived those tests without a glitch. What eventually killed it? I put it in the dryer. The extreme heat seems to have disagreed with the card's electronics.
Finally, it's worth noting that your memory card can be killed by the device you insert it into. This is pretty darned rare, but take the case of the Palm Tungsten T3. When that PDA was first released last summer, reports soon surfaced of SanDisk Secure Digital cards mysteriously failing inside the unit. It wasn't long before Palm recognized the problem and patched the operating system to eliminate a glitch that had the potential to damage removable media. I've never heard of such a problem occurring in a digital camera, so I wouldn't worry about that possibility very much.
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