USB Flash Drive vs SD/MicroSD Card Reliability in Write Cycles.

[Shaina11]

How reliable are SD/MicroSD Cards in concern of write cycles compared to USB Flash Drives? I mean, they're soooo tiny compared to flash drives, it would lead me to believe they don't have as many write cycles. I typically only trust SanDisk for my USB Flash Drives, and such.

 

[sirstinky]

It depends on how much you use it. Do you keep it plugged into the PC constantly? Usually cards in something like a smartphone, digital camera, MP3 player, etc. won't last as long as one that gets occasional use because they are getting I/O'd constantly. I've had the same SanDisk Class 10 8 GB card in my phone for the past 6 years...never had an issue with the card whereas my wife's phone has killed one in that same time. Flash memory is pretty reliable and can last a long time. As far as cycles? I don't have that number because it depends on how you use it.

 

[Shaina11]

It depends upon what I'm using it for at the time. Most of the time it will just be used for storing my music and videos, thus I'd need quite a large MicroSD Card, possibly up to 200 GB at some point in the future, I have a lot of movies and TV Shows.

But often enough I would be transferring large GBs worth of data at a time, either in music, videos, or just my general files to use in my computer. And a lot of times I end up recoding my videos so I delete the old ones and transfer the newly encoded versions, so I would imagine I would be using a lot of write cycles.

 

[sirstinky]

Ah. The best route is something like a SD card or USB thumb drive. I am assuming you're taking the data from a camera or a camcorder? If so, a USB drive won't work. The biggest MicroSD cards are 128 GB. The biggest SD cards are 512 GB (at $500!). SanDisk makes good memory, but so does Samsung and PNY. I'd trust any one of those for sure. If you're moving big files, get a big card. The more space the better. Go with the fastest I/O rating for the card, one like this

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-512GB-Memory-SDSDXPA-512G-G46/dp/B00NP699ZI/ref=sr_1_7?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1429417531&sr=1-7&keywords=sd+card

or

http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Elite-Performance-128GB-Speed/dp/B008PO5CSI/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1429418206&sr=1-2&keywords=sd+card

It's not cheap, but will last you a long time.

 

[Shaina11]

Not from cameras or camcorders, from DVDs/Blu-rays and YouTube and such. I collect videos. But they can get quite the handful, err, drive full when you have a few. I saw recently that SanDisk came out with a 200 GB MicroSD card, chances are I would go for the high speed cards anyway.

But I would just be concerned for the longevity of the card if I were to use MicroSD to hold my media and constant transfers from my laptop. I would think that a USB Flash Drive has more write cycles, and most of the time, for computers, I'll use a USB drive, but for phones and tablets, MicroSD. Though it'd be interesting to use SD Cards instead of USB Flash Drives for my computer. I just think it wouldn't be as reliable.