They have been known to unexpectedly fail, however. It is not often,
but it happens. So not all is wonderful.
It sort of makes a good argument for buying the less expensive
smaller ones. Not as much will be lost with a failure. Or get the
large ones now with the idea of moving into a 24MP camera next year. :-)
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On / June 11, 2007 CE, at 12:02 PM, Moose wrote:
> John Hudson wrote:
>> I use 2GB compact flash cards with my E500. I shoot in RAW mode.
>>
>> I use a Verbatim MicroDrive and Windows Explorer to download the
>> images to
>> my PC and then use the Olympus software to process the images. I
>> delete all
>> images from the card excepting only the last one.
>>
>> Does the compact flash card have a finite life in terms of the
>> number of
>> images that can be written by the camera? If there is a finite
>> life how many
>> images can be written by the camera before the card dies?
>>
> Yes, they can wear out
> No, it won't happen in practical use.
>
> The individual bits in flash memory have a limited life. In fact,
> the on
> card controller distributes writes across the whole card, so the
> bottom
> part won't wear out first.
>
> However, the number of cycles is so high that the chances of any
> heavily
> working pro wearing one out before it becomes technologically obsolete
> is nil.
>
> From the Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
>
> "With these mechanisms in place, some industry analysts have
> calculated
> that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51
> years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes
> frequently cause the /entire/ disk to be overwritten. This figure (51
> years) involved a worst-case scenario using specific data
> parameters and
> should not be confused with a particular "shelf life" for a flash
> memory
> device. The bottom line is that a typical user using a commercial
> device, such as a camera, with a flash drive will probably not wear
> out
> the memory for the effective life of the camera."
>
> Moose
>
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