[stevebrot]

But, on to your question: Armor All contains water, PDMS (a silicone compound), diethylene glycol, glycerin and some other chemicals. Do you really want those materials in your camera's card slot?

Armor All has only two valid uses in my house, yard, or garage with that being on blackwall tires and the vinyl roof on my '92 Riviera. Even then, the number of applications per year is generally no more than one. Dash? I think not.


Steve

[Pentaxrookie]

Why do Youtubers typically see if they can make a 9 minute video when 1 minute would do just fine?

Video is doomed.😎
That's why l don't watch YT anymore. The information density is too low.

[volley]

I haven't experienced any mechanical issues with my SD cards, and the oldest are probably more than 10 years old.
But I have had little pieces breaking away from SD card adapters for micro-SD cards. The material for some of these adapters seems to be very brittle.
Luckily this hasn't caused any serious problem but whenever possible I stay away from using micro SD now.

[MossyRocks]

I'm still trying to find the article, but if I recall correctly, the lifespan of most solid state digital memory is close to or better than 100 million writes/ re-writes.

That number sounds ballpark for the card overall but would not be correct for individual cells or sectors. The write/rewirtes for a cell or sector would be in the low thousands it is the wear leveling and spare capacity that allows the large total write cycles. When I last built a computer I noticed that a lot of SSDs are now listing an endurance in total amount written. For example this 500GB SSD has an endurance of 300TB written which is a value also used in their warranty which would put each cell written to 600 times (ignoring the relatively small spare capacity). Given that SSDs use better quality flash than SD cards and SSDs in general have better controllers I would expect SD cards to have a shorter relative life.

[James also]

I have had some issues with the plastics on Micro SD cards that tend to be removed from the phone a lot more than the SD from the Camera. I have only just started using a card reader so it will be something to look out for.

[Not a Number]

The write cycle life can be as low as 500 writes. It depends on the type of memory being used. I don't know where people get 100,000 from - unless there have been major advances since the white paper below. Budget cards may not even have wear leveling.

From a white paper by Kingston (see emphasized section below for most relevant data):

• Solid State: Flash storage devices, as semiconductor storage devices, have no moving parts and thereby are not
subject to the mechanical failure issues of hard drives. Their overall data reliability enabled them to dominate the
convenience-oriented portable memory products market, operating silently with a zero decibel noise level.

• Small Physical Size (or Form Factor): Flash storage devices are designed to be easily transported. Convenience is
an important criterion, especially for consumer and corporate applications.

• High Data Reliability: Flash memory is very reliable and many of the Flash storage device types also include Error
Correction Code (ECC) checking and advanced wear leveling.

For example, Kingston’s solid-state drives have a rated error specification of less than one (1) bit in 1,000,000,000,000,000
bits read (1 bit per 10 15 bits read).

• Kingston Flash Data Retention: Kingston Flash Storage Devices primarily use MLC/TLC Flash Memory. Data
retention on Flash memory is dynamic since the amount of time the memory has been cycled affects data
retention. Important information should always be backed up on other media for long-term safekeeping.

• Wear-Leveling Technology: Kingston Flash storage devices incorporate controllers utilizing advanced wear-
leveling technology, which distributes the number of P/E cycles (program/erase) across the Flash memory evenly.
Wear-leveling thus extends the useful life of a Flash memory card (for details, please see Kingston Flash Cell
Endurance section, next).

• Flash Cell Endurance: Non-Volatile Flash Memory cells have a finite number of program/erase (p/e) cycles. Simply
put, every time data is written to or erased from a Flash Storage Device the number of program/erase cycles
decrease and are eventually used up to the point that the Flash memory is no longer usable.

• For Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash, up to 3000 write cycles per physical sector based on current lithography process (19nm and 20nm) at the time of this writing. For Single-Level Cell (SLC) Flash, up to 30,000 write cycles per physical sector. For Triple-level Cell (TLC), up to 500 write cycles per physical sector. Lithography of the Flash Memory Die plays a key role in cell endurance and decreases as the size of the die gets smaller.

• Flash Memory Technology: For Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash use multiple levels per cell which will allow more bits
to be stored using the same number of transistors. MLC NAND flash technology uses four possible states per cell.
As for Single-Level Cell (SLC) each cell can be stored in two states. For Triple-Level Cell ( TLC) the bits are allowed
to be stored in eight possible state. Lithography of the Flash Memory Die plays a key role in cell endurance and
decreases as the size of the die get smaller.

• Write Amplification Factor: Write Amplification Factor or “WAF” is present in all Flash Storage Devices. The write
amplification factor is the ratio between the amount of data written from the host and the amount of actually
data written to the Flash memory chips. All Flash devices write in full blocks, which means, that in order to write to
a block that may already contain some data the Flash controller must move the existing data in the block (usually
to memory) and combine it with the new data and write all the data back to the Flash memory. For example a
2MB file could be written by the host to the Flash device however 4MB of total data may be written to the Flash
memory to complete the write operation. In this case you would have a write amplification factor of 2. In some
cases the WAF can be as high as 20 or 30.

• Automatic Bad Sector Remapping: Kingston Flash controllers automatically lock out sections with bad memory
cells (“bad blocks”) and move the data to other sections (“space blocks”) to avoid data corruption. During factory
formatting (as described in Section 2), spare blocks are set aside on the Flash storage device for remapping bad
sectors over time to extend the useful life and reliability of the Flash storage device.

https://media.kingston.com/pdfs/MKF_283.1_Flash_Memory_Guide_EN.pdf

This "Test to destruction" article regarding SSDs will be of interest since SSD use the same memory:
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report

[DeadJohn]

It's absurd to armor-all your cards and throw them away because the plastic is too old. Don't mistreat the cards and the plastic body will last. The plastic body of an SD card is exposed to very little stress. The card is usually protected inside a camera, card slot, storage wallet, etc. It doesn't get bent. It's not in direct sunlight. It's not exposed to much ozone.

Manufacturing defects can cause plastic to fail prematurely. Taken to an extreme, imagine using a new card every day to avoid "old" plastic. You increase your risk of manufacturing defects over what would happen if you kept using an old but proven card.


Car dashboards are a special case because of direct sun exposure sealed inside the greenhouse of a car cabin. I have a 21 year old car with a like new dashboard because the car is often parked in a garage.

[PDL]

All I can say is that my 1GB and 256MB cards from the 2005 days still work.

The only SD card I had that failed outright was the 64GB MicroSDSX card that died in my phone last year. That is after it was in my Windows phone for 3 years, it lasted about one in the Motorola phone - SanDisk replaced it.

[James also]

All I can say is that my 1GB and 256MB cards from the 2005 days still work.

The only SD card I had that failed outright was the 64GB MicroSDSX card that died in my phone last year. That is after it was in my Windows phone for 3 years, it lasted about one in the Motorola phone - SanDisk replaced it.

All my old SD cards are still working They were replaced simply because I wanted bigger and faster.

Old Micro SD cards though I have had 2 die electronically. A small 1Gig that came with a phone and the 16 Gig bought to replace it. Now have a 32 Gig in there.

As stated earlier I did have a Micro that Physically broke on me.

[PDL]

I use the old small cards when I want to limit the number of images I can take. Sort of like using 12 shot rolls of film back in the day.

[MossyRocks]

Don't go bringing actual facts and evidence into this discussion.
Actually I think people see the total number of write cycles to a card and think that means filling the card which is why you see numbers like 100,000,000 tossed around. However there is some specialty flash that is used for the sector mapping that I believe has like a 100,000 write cycle life per cell. It is expensive and not very dense which is why it is used for doing the sector mapping and storing wear leveling data for the cheaper regular flash used for actual storage or in specialty applications. For those curious here is a fairly reasonable list of the write endurance of various types of flash memory cells.

[WillWeaverRVA]

I think I've only ever had one card actually fail, and another get chewed up by a dog, so I've still got plenty of older cards that are still kicking. I'll use them every now and then if I'm not shooting a basketball game or anything else that requires lots of burst shooting.

[SSGGeezer]

Heat is what has destroyed some of my Micro-SD cards. The heat in my old Kindle HD caused the card to turn partially to dust when I tried to remove it. I have not experienced anything similar in my cameras, though they do get warm in the card reader when uploading images to my computer.