Could this be used as a hard drive?

[TheGreatSatan]

Could you use a 16GB or 32GB SD card as a hard drive?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22597

[BuzzKillington]

Ya, but they'd be extremely slow and would be short-lived.

[Kayin]

In lInux, EXT2 has provisions for doing just so.

Planning one for my submersed project.

[Oneslowz28]

All SD and CF memory has a limited number of Read / Write cycles using them as HHD makes them wear out very fast and the possibility of data loss is great.

[Trace]

What if you ran it in a RAID setup? Since they are so cheap.

[Oneslowz28]

the read write cycles are still limited. It will still wear out eventually. I have to replace 1-3 high end compact flash cards a year due to them going bad from too many read write cycles. Thats only about 20-30k writes and the amount of reads

[Kayin]

EXT2 has wear leveling built in, so it should extend that quite a bit. Possibly up to 10 times, from what I read on the intertubes, but I have no solid data to say yay or nay.

[xRyokenx]

I have a 16GB SDHC card and think it has already died on me... that or my mp3 player doesn't like it.

So do SD, etc. cards seriously go bad after being read so many times? Crazy.

[Oneslowz28]

Yea they seriously have a limited number of read / write cycles.

[xRyokenx]

So my 16GB SDHC card wasn't going to last in my mp3 player for more than a few months? Every time I put it into the player the thing reads all the files as "UNKNOWN" and doesn't play anything.

[mtekk]

So do SD, etc. cards seriously go bad after being read so many times? Crazy.

No, reads are "free".


Yea they seriously have a limited number of read / write cycles.

Not exactly, reads are "free". Writing/erasing is what causes wear.

All flash memory has a limited number of times that it can be written due to physical degradation of the underlying storage medium. The floating gate that provides the hysteresis that is used to store information ends up getting stuck at 1 or 0 eventually. This happens as the electrolyte (traditionally SiO2) breaks down due to having too many carriers being punched through it. Every time you write to flash memory you're exploiting quantum tunneling (the same thing that causes leakage current in processors). Reading works as reading the charge on a capacitor that does not discharge very rapidly, the floating gate has a charge and that determines if it is storing a 1 or a 0. Reads are "free" where as erase/writes are "expensive".

[Eclecticos]

These are preddy cool also.
Digital LED Candle Blow Sensitive. (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12326)

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/6902/ledcandles.jpg

[Eclecticos]

And These. Customizable Text Dot-Matrix Blue LED Scrolling (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22838)

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1913/ledbuckle.jpg

[SXRguyinMA]

I've been using a 5GB SD card for well over a year now, use it for taking pics with my camera, transferring files between computers, etc, has never let me down, still works beautifully

[TheGreatSatan]

5GB? I've seen 2, 4, and 8, but not 5