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Why are SD cards too fragile?

jwolf6589

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
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Many say I should not store data on a sd card long term. Well I do this but it’s no big deal if I lose the data since it’s backed up to my Mac and my Mac is also backed up to a USB hard drive. I say compared to the old floppy disk or Zip disk which I had many of at one time SD cards are a great storage medium.

I use the photos app and have two libraries. One for iPhone/iPad which can be accessed from my appleTV, and my Canon library which is for my canons.

I have had my 64GB card in my camcorder since 2018 and I have yet to have a problem. If this was my only backup I’d say the posters here we’re correct but since I have backups I can continue to store data on a sd card. Oh and I forgot. Back in the PALM OS days I used a sd card for data and never had a problem.
 
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The bits of data are stored by electrical charge. Because the insulating material is imperfect. This data can be lost or corrupted over time. How long really depends on the specific device, wear and environmental factors.

This applies to various types of solid state storage. Not just SD cards. You might be good for many years. Decades even for some. Eventually it will fail.

Archival hard drives are better for long term storage. Archival optical media is even better.
 
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SD cards are unreliable mostly because they’re cheap, not because there’s anything inherently unreliable about the form factor or protocol. There are several different underlying storage types, but the only way to know which one you have is to x-ray it. Even from the same product line from the same brand, one of them may be using a type of memory that’s radiation hardened and good for space applications, and the other may corrupt easily.

So unless you’ve got the resources to verify which kind you have, you’re best off assuming it’s the worse kind (even if it’s a good brand and an expensive card). Maybe you’ll be lucky and it will never fail. Or maybe you won’t and it will. But as long as you’ve got your photos on your computer too you’re fine.
 
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bsamcash said:
That's a difficult question to answer. I have SD cards I have used regularly for years with no issues, and I have some that have failed within a month. There are a lot of factors to consider. But I would not trust any of them to store important data for long term.
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Why do Android phones use them?
 
jwolf6589 said:
How long?
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10,000 write cycles to each block location is the expected life of a solid state storage device. That is why SSDs have a storage management capability in them now to balance the writes on the disks to try to balance writes across the whole drive.

Android phones use them to expand their storage as they are absolutely fine fo day to day use but not for long term archival needs.

Also, whereas mechanical platter hard drives typically fail over a period of time beginning with bad blocks showing up for example, with a solid state drive or SD card it is a binary fail - either it is fine, or it is dead with nothing in between.
 
jwolf6589 said:
Many say I should not store data on a sd card long term. Well I do this but it’s no big deal if I lose the data since it’s backed up to my Mac and my Mac is also backed up to a USB hard drive. I say compared to the old floppy disk or Zip disk which I had many of at one time SD cards are a great storage medium.

I use the photos app and have two libraries. One for iPhone/iPad which can be accessed from my appleTV, and my Canon library which is for my canons.

I have had my 64GB card in my camcorder since 2018 and I have yet to have a problem. If this was my only backup I’d say the posters here we’re correct but since I have backups I can continue to store data on a sd card. Oh and I forgot. Back in the PALM OS days I used a sd card for data and never had a problem.
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OK, so in response to the last paragraph, I work in IT I KNOW I am correct about data archival. You have limited experience with this memory format as a light consumer relative to others on here.

Speaking from experience, doing firmware upgrades to servers in data centres using an SD card was fun. You would typically get through about 80 servers before the card either snapped from being badly handled or the data started to fail when read. 80 servers sounds good but then you have 70,000 of them to get done, then you need a better solution.

One of the systems I worked on for a well known Telecom company used to have 14 DLT tape drives to back up the production systems every night. Capacity wise it needed 9. The other 6 were there because at least 2 would fail most nights. Funny enough, this company paid so much in hardware maintenance contracts that the hardware manufacturer employed an engineer to sit onsite at the customer just in case so when things broke he was already there to get them fixed. When you have 70,000 servers then something always breaks.

Archival storage mediums have a guaranteed storage life of 30 years+

The issue with SD cards is like the other posters said, it could be years, could be never but It may also be tomorrow when that card fails - ever pull out the card without ejecting it first? Bad idea. If it is still writing to memory you can corrupt data. If you have, you know how easy that is to do. This of course also applies to USB hard drives. If you kill the power before it has written the cache to the disk, it is gone
 
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SD cards are physically quite delicate.

I guess if you never take them out, you don't need to worry about them, but as others have said cards are not and never have been meant for long term storage.

Of course I say that and then remember that my most use cameras have card compartments that look like this, and when I took this photo was probably the first time in well over a year I've actually removed the SD card. It's my repository for JPEGs that I'll never look at but eventually dump on an external hard drive and still never again look at-about the only time I'll actually grab something off the SD is if I need something NOW and don't really want to work it up. As SD cards go, this one was not inexpensive when I bought it, although the CF card was probably 3-4x as expensive.

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CF is basically a dead end technology at this point. A few companies had older CF cameras still in production up until somewhat recently(Nikon would sell you a D5 with either CF or XQD, although most opted for the latter) but XQD/CFExpress now seems to be the favored format.

Other than absolute size, I can not think of any application where SD is used that XQD/CFExpress would not be better. They are faster and physically much more robust. Of course the cards themselves and the hardware implementation aren't inexpensive.

CF hung around for a long time too for speed and durability reasons, although the pins are an inherent weakness on CF(or rather the card slots).
 
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The camera drive cards ones not made in China are stronger
but they are in hiding and under boycott in Chinese camera.
 
kenoh said:
If it is still writing to memory you can corrupt data. If you have, you know how easy that is to do. This of course also applies to USB hard drives. If you kill the power before it has written the cache to the disk, it is gone
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This one has caught me plenty of times.

For one, I had a card reader with a flaky cable and sometimes it would unmount if moved just right in the middle of a transfer. Transferring direct from the camera isn't immune to this sort of problem either.

More recently, I've been using a(rather nice) OWC TB3 dock that has an SD reader built in, plus I have my good Lexar CF/SD reader semi-permanently plugged in. Even though OWC makes a nice one-click-ejector program, it's still easy to forget you have something plugged in if you haven't used it that session. Most TB3 cables are high quality, but a flaky cable can get you there. I also have things such that I could plug in a TB1/2 computer if I desired, and do from time to time, and I had a bad TB1 cable that caught me a couple of times before I replaced it.
 
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bunnspecial said:
SD cards are physically quite delicate.

I guess if you never take them out, you don't need to worry about them, but as others have said cards are not and never have been meant for long term storage.

Of course I say that and then remember that my most use cameras have card compartments that look like this, and when I took this photo was probably the first time in well over a year I've actually removed the SD card. It's my repository for JPEGs that I'll never look at but eventually dump on an external hard drive and still never again look at-about the only time I'll actually grab something off the SD is if I need something NOW and don't really want to work it up. As SD cards go, this one was not inexpensive when I bought it, although the CF card was probably 3-4x as expensive.

View attachment 1915419View attachment 1915420


CF is basically a dead end technology at this point. A few companies had older CF cameras still in production up until somewhat recently(Nikon would sell you a D5 with either CF or XQD, although most opted for the latter) but XQD/CFExpress now seems to be the favored format.

Other than absolute size, I can not think of any application where SD is used that XQD/CFExpress would not be better. They are faster and physically much more robust. Of course the cards themselves and the hardware implementation aren't inexpensive.

CF hung around for a long time too for speed and durability reasons, although the pins are an inherent weakness on CF(or rather the card slots).
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I never take out my SD cards but they stay in my cameras since I use USB to transfer to Mac.
 
jwolf6589 said:
Many say I should not store data on a sd card long term.
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Many do say this, for very good reasons based on industry best practices and experience. It’s your choice, though, how you deal with your own media! :) I make my living writing software and working a lot with storage hardware and would strongly advise against using SD cards for long term storage from experience. Digital photography classes I’ve taken (in person, online or otherwise), don’t recommend it. My friends and mentors in photography would advise against it. I know of no photographers, professional or amateur, who would recommend SD cards for long term storage. I know of no videographers who would recommend it either. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there but I haven’t met any. It’s truly your choice though and it only affects you. I wouldn’t imagine many of us here would tell anyone to use SD cards for long term storage on MacRumors as doing so would probably flout forum rules for knowingly providing incorrect information.

It sounds like despite how you’ve framed your thread, even you don’t use SD cards as primary long term storage, as the contents are stored on your Mac and another drive as well. You may not delete your SD cards but you use your media on other devices and back it up too. Can you help clarify what you were after as I wasn’t too clear? Were you just observing that many here give industry standard advice on the best way to use SD cards in one‘s photographic workflow?
 
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Clix Pix said:
Well, one day when a card becomes corrupted and he loses everything, the OP will regret his current process.....
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I wont because you have failed to read my OP. Everything is already backed up. I am just wondering how long my current SD cards will last, but no one knows it sure seems.
 
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jwolf6589 said:
I wont because you have failed to read my OP. Everything is already backed up.
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What was the point you were trying to make with your OP. It’s not clear to me.

If it’s that you don’t ever erase your SD cards after copying them to permanent storage, feel free. If it’s that you don’t buy spares or have backup SD cards, that’s certainly your choice too. That’s not a recommended practice that you will find from any photographers I know, as I outlined above, but hey, no one is making you do anything.:)
 
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Well, that's a start, backing up to your Mac and also backing up to (one?) USB external hard drive.... How often do you run backups? How old is the computer and its drive? What happens if something major goes wrong with your computer and the drive dies? Why only the one external drive? How old is it? External drives can be flaky and while they're fine one minute, the next time they're put to use perhaps in the meantime something has gone wrong, the drive isn't functioning any more and the data is lost.

Most photographers use the policy of three backups, one usually being retained at home on-site, one maybe being shunted up to "the cloud" and the third being the backup on a physical external HDD or SSD being regularly swapped in-and-out at work (if one has one's own desk and office), a family member or friend's home (if they live within reasonable driving distance) or, if neither of those is an option, a safe deposit box at one's bank, which of course can also be used for other important documents and items.
 
r.harris1 said:
What was the point you were trying to make with your OP. It’s not clear to me.

If it’s that you don’t ever erase your SD cards after copying them to permanent storage, feel free. If it’s that you don’t buy spares or have backup SD cards, that’s certainly your choice too. That’s not a recommended practice that you will find from any photographers I know, as I outlined above, but hey, no one is making you do anything.:)
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Extra SD cards? That may be a good idea.
 
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Clix Pix said:
Well, that's a start, backing up to your Mac and also backing up to (one?) USB external hard drive.... How often do you run backups? How old is the drive? What happens if something major goes wrong with your computer and the drive dies? Why only the one external drive? Most photographers use the policy of three backups, one usually being retained at home on-site, one maybe being shunted up to "the cloud" and the third being the backup on a physical external HDD or SSD being regularly swapped in-and-out at work (if one has one's own desk and office), a family member or friend's home (if they live within reasonable driving distance) or, if neither of those is an option, a safe deposit box at one's bank, which of course can also be used for other important documents and items.
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Two backups of my data? Hmm a good idea. ? Hmm can I use my i cloud drive to store a copy of my canon photo library? Bad idea as my photo library is 35GB!!!!
 
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