How many times can I use the same SD card?

[Ripper7620]

Does anybody know approximately how many times I can format and reuse the same SD card before the quality starts to degrade? I'm still at the point of dialing in my craft, so it's not worth saving what I'm laying down on the cards at this point. When I can consistantly get good results, I'll probably start saving my full SD cards that have A-grade material. Thank you in advance.

 

[Meta4]

Does anybody know approximately how many times I can format and reuse the same SD card before the quality starts to degrade?

SD cards last a long time ..many thousands of read/write cycles.
How Long Do Memory Cards Last?

I'm still at the point of dialing in my craft, so it's not worth saving what I'm laying down on the cards at this point. When I can consistantly get good results, I'll probably start saving my full SD cards that have A-grade material.

SD cards aren't a very practical or cost effective longterm storage solution.
A better idea is to copy your image files to your computer after a flight and periodically transfer your saved image files to a backup drive.

 

[Ripper7620]

SD cards last a long time ..many thousands of read/write cycles.
How Long Do Memory Cards Last?

SD cards aren't a very practical or cost effective longterm storage solution.
A better idea is to copy your image files to your computer after a flight and periodically transfer your saved image files to a backup drive.

Thank you for the reply, I save my processed files to both a hard disk, and also an external SSD. Right now, I'm basically "just practicing" and working on my craft. Eventually though, I will want to save "the good stuff" in raw form for reprocessing them in the future, in various different ways. As I improve at post production I will want to go back and reprocess older files as I get better at the craft. The one thing I like about SD cards is that they don't take up a lot of space, although the cost adds up quickly using U-3's.

 

[Meta4]

Thank you for the reply, I save my processed files to both a hard disk, and also an external SSD. Right now, I'm basically "just practicing" and working on my craft. Eventually though, I will want to save "the good stuff" in raw form for reprocessing them in the future, in various different ways. As I improve at post production I will want to go back and reprocess older files as I get better at the craft. The one thing I like about SD cards is that they don't take up a lot of space, although the cost adds up quickly using U-3's.

I would think that SD cards are quite impractical for long term storage which might be why I've never heard of anyone doing it.
You can't easily label them and keeping them is a way you can easily sort and access would be tricky.
They are also very easy to drop or lose.
If you are transferring your image files to other media, there's no advantage in going back to the original SD card versions.

 

[Ripper7620]

I would think that SD cards are quite impractical for long term storage which might be why I've never heard of anyone doing it.
You can't easily label them and keeping them is a way you can easily sort and access would be tricky.
They are also very easy to drop or lose.
If you are transferring your image files to other media, there's no advantage in going back to the original SD card versions.

Thank you for the reply, the basic point of my OP was to ask how many times I can get away with formatting and re-using the SD cards before the quality of the raw data starts to degrade. I can't argue with the point that SD cards are an impractical long term storage solution.

 

[BigAl07]

I've got SD cards that have many hundreds of cycles on them with no problems.

 

[Raptorman0909]

One thing to remember is that SD cards use flash memory and they are not designed to be written to indefinitely. The controller built into flash memory devices manage where the data is written so that some memory locations are not written to all the time while other locations are avoided -- that would result in an early death for the device. So, they manage this by spreading the data around to avoid over using some locations. The consequence of this can be a reduction in performance as the controller writes some data here and other data there to more fully exercise the totality of storage.

So, what I'm saying is that it IS possible for an SD card to degrade in performance with time. The controller should even this out, but there can be times when writing data the device is slowed by the need to skip areas that are available but have been used more than other areas.

Lastly, I think the way DJI handles SD cards, or more precisely uSD cards, is not as tolerant as I'd like and I think it is this very issue that gives me the image tearing problems I've described numerous times in my videos. In this video, at about 3:13+, I show this tearing a couple times.

I use a top quality Sandisk Extreme Plus 128GB SDXC V30 U3 memory card and have also used a Samsung Evo 64GB SDXC U3 memory card with the same results -- tearing in many videos. On some flight I have no tearing issues at all and on other flights I can have dozens. My suspicion is that the P4P is not quite capable of handling the volume of data and the work to be done on it and the controller gets behind and begins to drop frames. I think my settings of UHD@30 with D-Cinelike, -1/0/-1 and H.265 may put extra workload on the controller and for that reason I see issues that some other do not.

If the card has to jump all over the place to write data to avoid overusing some locations that could further exacerbate the marginal controller/processor in the P4P and make the tearing issue more common.


Brian

 

[solentlife]

Does anybody know approximately how many times I can format and reuse the same SD card before the quality starts to degrade? I'm still at the point of dialing in my craft, so it's not worth saving what I'm laying down on the cards at this point. When I can consistantly get good results, I'll probably start saving my full SD cards that have A-grade material. Thank you in advance.

Its a sticks and stones item actually ...

I'm a great believer based on early days of 5.25 and 3.5 floppys etc. and then WOW the 40MB HDD ... (which in those days had to be split to not be greater than 32MB in one partition) ... yes those were the days !! anyway - a great believer in cut and paste rather than format.

My vids / photos get CUT from the SD card and I only format once in blue moon.

It was understood in those dark old days that as a disk or partition gets used - it develops bad sectors. Can be for variety of reasons - but one is corruption. When a file is deleted or quick format used - the data is still there but file name has been altered and FAT register modified. You THINK the file is gone but its not really.
So you cut / paste / overwrite and eventually you start to get odd errors. Quick format doesn't help much either. But a FULL Format often corrects those bad sectors AND reconstitutes the FAT properly.
You should then have a better card ...

All in laymans language of course as I'm no techy geek ...

Nigel

 

[RunningWithScissors]

I use a top quality Sandisk Extreme Plus 128GB SDXC V30 U3 memory card and have also used a Samsung Evo 64GB SDXC U3 memory card with the same results

Brian,
You mentioned using 128GB cards. The advertised specs imply the largest usable card size in the Phantom is 64GB. Can you confirm that the card reader in the Phantom can actually write to the space above 64GB on a 128GB card?

 

[Raptorman0909]

Brian,
You mentioned using 128GB cards. The advertised specs imply the largest usable card size in the Phantom is 64GB. Can you confirm that the card reader in the Phantom can actually write to the space above 64GB on a 128GB card?

I'll check but I do believe so. Also, I seem to remember the P4P was spec'd to handle 128GB cards, but again, I'll check. I've been using the 128GB card for more than a year and other that the image tearing issue, which also happens with the smaller and equally spec'd Samsung card, I've not had any other problems that I'm aware of. The transfer rate is 80MB/s to 95MB/s for both cards so both are well above the speed needed for the 4K video streaming at 43GB/hour which is just about 12.2MB/s.


Brian

 

[Neon Euc]

Best long term storage....YouTube. I upload all my video edits on there. If one of my 3 hard drive goes then I can back up from YouTube or my other external hard drives

 

[Raptorman0909]

Best long term storage....YouTube. I upload all my video edits on there. If one of my 3 hard drive goes then I can back up from YouTube or my other external hard drives

I am nearing 100 videos uploaded to YT and should hit 100 within a month or so. I have way more than 3 HD's worth of images and video -- my desktop PC, where I do most of my editing, has two 6TB drives and both are more than half filled. In the field I take about four 2TB external HD's and two 4TB externals as well as a 512GB Samsung external SSD to store the images and video I capture during the trip. I copy the SD/uSD cards first to the SSD drive on my laptop, then to the external SSD, then to the external HD's so that I always have at least two copies and preferably three. 4K videos eats data like its going out of style, by my Nikon D800E DSLR is no slouch at an average of 45MB/image.

There can NEVER be too much storage!


Brian

 

[Ripper7620]

I generally don't upload to YT , because there isn't fast internet access in my area, so I use external SSD's, and some to my 10 TB internal disk drive.