Quote:
Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm
I don't use them as my main back up media for several reasons:
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[*]The fact they have a limited number of write/erase cycles compared to a traditional hdd (a problem with all solid state drives)
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I don't consider that a huge problem. The write/erase limit is around 100,000 operations, and the controller circuitry transparently maps failing cells so they don't get used. You'll see graceful degradation if you see anything at all, and you are likely to replace the drive with a higher capacity model long before the limit will come close to biting you.
But yes, you
do get what you pay for. There are about four companies that manufacture the actual flash media (Hitachi, Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba), and everyone buys media from them and puts it in their own packaging under their own name.
I did benchmarks on same SD cards used in my PDA, and had one card where the benchmark took so long I thought the device had hung and was about to reset it. Nope. It turned out that all other values were in line with the other cards, but
writes were an order of magnitude slower. The benchmark test was trying to write a 1MB file to the drive, and taking a long time to do it.
It was a PNY card using Toshiba media, and a correspondent on another forum reported similar experience with a Kingston card that also used Toshiba media. Slow writes weren't a deal breaker in my usage, as files would be put on the card with a USB reader, and only read by the PDA. Read speeds were acceptable.
It did cement my resolve to buy brand names, even at slightly higher costs, to have media I could be confident would work.
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Dennis