Sdcard vs USB flash drive lifespan

bononos

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Aug 21, 2011
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Is there a difference between the wear leveling and other factors which influence lifespan btwn sdcards and usb thumb drives? I assume thumb drives are better because theres more space/power for drive controller.
There was a thread talking about static/dynamic wear leveling on usb thumb drives previously and it got me thinking whether sdcards have better or worse wear leveling compared to thumb drives.

Its easy to get 3d-tlc sdcards (evoplus) but it seems much harder to figure out which usb flash drives have 3d flash.

Finally its seems logical that larger flash drives/sdcards are going to be more durable in terms of write degradation but this thead #13 from another website mentions that erase page/block size could be proportionately larger compared to smaller drives thus making them just as susceptible to wear.
 
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Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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Is there a difference between the wear leveling and other factors which influence lifespan btwn sdcards and usb thumb drives? I assume thumb drives are better because theres more space/power for drive controller.
There was a thread talking about static/dynamic wear leveling on usb thumb drives previously and it got me thinking whether sdcards have better or worse wear leveling compared to thumb drives.

You shouldn't trust either further then you can throw then. Flashdrives and SD cards are a race to the bottom, so something has to give. They should be treated as unreliable temporary storage. In many cases they're were all the questionable quality NAND ends up. Some don't even have a proper controller as such. Combined with TLC (even QLC) that is not a recipe for reliability.

I'd generably be more inclined to trust a 1st party device, from an established brand. But is pure anecdotal evidence.

For reliable external flash storage, it might be worthwhile to get a "real" external SSD. It'll have much higher R/W speeds too. You could also roll your own.

Its easy to get 3d-tlc sdcards (evoplus) but it seems much harder to figure out which usb flash drives have 3d flash.

Most likely on purpose. Distasteful as that may be.

Finally its seems logical that larger flash drives/sdcards are going to be more durable in terms of write degradation but this thead #13 from another website mentions that erase page/block size could be proportionately larger compared to smaller drives thus making them just as susceptible to wear.

That is correct. Some don't even do wear levelling at all, burning out the same cells over and over. Worse there is often no way to tell before the drive dies.
 

hojnikb

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Sep 18, 2014
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You shouldn't trust either further then you can throw then. Flashdrives and SD cards are a race to the bottom, so something has to give. They should be treated as unreliable temporary storage. In many cases they're were all the questionable quality NAND ends up. Some don't even have a proper controller as such. Combined with TLC (even QLC) that is not a recipe for reliability.

I'd generably be more inclined to trust a 1st party device, from an established brand. But is pure anecdotal evidence.

For reliable external flash storage, it might be worthwhile to get a "real" external SSD. It'll have much higher R/W speeds too. You could also roll your own.



Most likely on purpose. Distasteful as that may be.



That is correct. Some don't even do wear levelling at all, burning out the same cells over and over. Worse there is often no way to tell before the drive dies.

I have yet to find such controller. Most if not all flash controllers do some kind of dynamic and static wear leveling. In the past (like 10 years ago) the very cheap controllers only did dynamic wear levelling though.
If a such controller does exist, i'd really like to see the specs .)
 

Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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I have yet to find such controller. Most if not all flash controllers do some kind of dynamic and static wear leveling. In the past (like 10 years ago) the very cheap controllers only did dynamic wear levelling though.
If a such controller does exist, i'd really like to see the specs .)

It's gotten a lot better then it has been, controllers today are much better. Thankfully.

In ye olden days (20 years ago), some devices didn't even use a proper "controller" as such, but just wrote directly to NAND.
 

hojnikb

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Sep 18, 2014
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20 years ago SLC was still widely used and with 100k p/e cycles, having no real wear levelling support wasn't such a big deal for consumer devices like sd cards.
 

Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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20 years ago SLC was still widely used and with 100k p/e cycles, having no real wear levelling support wasn't such a big deal for consumer devices like sd cards.

...and yet devices still died regularly. SD cards and flashdrives are here because they're cheap, not because they're reliable.
 

WilliamM2

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Jun 14, 2012
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I've got a 14 year old 1GB SD card my wife uses constantly in her camera. It's still going strong. I have a couple other SD and micro SD cards that are at least 5 years old that I use in a couple devices, never had an SD card fail yet.

I haven't bought a USB drive since 2012, when I got a few 16GB Pny's on sale. Never really needed more. I've never had a USB drive fail either.

Would I use them for backups? No, but I don't understand why people think they are so unreliable. I still have the first USB drive I ever got, a 64mb Pny, probably 17-18 years old. It still works, and still has the Intel RAID drivers I last used it for when installing Win 2000 and XP! That's after a decade or more without being plugged in at all.
 
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mindless1

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Aug 11, 2001
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It's been a long time since I had a memory card or USB flash drive failure and IIRC the last flash drive failure was years ago, bumping it while plugged into a USB port which broke the PCB solder joints.

I use USB flash drives for backups regularly, once a week minimum and make a backup of one flash drive onto another for redundancy, as well as less frequent backup onto a HDD.

Granted one of them is a Sandisk Extreme but it's been used all day every day for Thunderbird Portable to manage multiple email providers' accounts, for the last 6 years or so, maybe longer, but the other one is just some tiny cheap Muskin 32GB thing... I don't have more than a few GB (if that) which needs backed up on a weekly basis.

To me it depends on purpose. If I write 1GB a week on the cheap flash drive and it has 500 write cycles, that's enough years for my purposes.

I do dozens of GB system partition backups on larger USB flash drives but only do those once a month. Supposing I completely filled one each time and it has 500 write cycles, that's 500/12mos. = 42 years. Even so I still have a redundant backup of those on a HDD.
 
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VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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It's pretty obvious that people saying that their flash drive lasted for 14 years, have not used Adata flash drives, or at least, the ones that they were selling a year ago.

Friend has had nearly 100% failures on them, using them in Linux, to write bootable ISOs to. Gets maybe 5-10 re-writes, then it croaks.

I use them for ISOs as well, as they are pretty nearly the cheapest flash drives available (and that comes at some reliability / endurance cost, I'm sure), but I tend not to re-write mine, I just pull another one out of the package... they cost $3 ea., I consider them disposable if they fail.

I don't use flash drives, normally, as backups.

Edit: To clarify, I even had out-of-the-box DOA units, that wouldn't even identify in Windows 10, some of them. Maybe 10-15% at times.

But the newest batches, the ones that identify in BIOS / UEFI boot menus as "Innostor", seem to be higher-quality, than whatever controller that they were using last year.
 
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hojnikb

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Sep 18, 2014
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Innostor is pretty much at the bottom of the barrel as far as flash controllers go. Awful random performance and very simplistic design (as it should be, since they're very cheap).