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DS Misc > CF card life

#98085 - Kung Fu - Sun Aug 13, 2006 3:35 am

I'm using a gbamp with a 1 GB ultra II scandisk CF card. I use moonshell as my primary homebrew app for launching programs and for music and video. How ling can I expect my CF card to last?

#98087 - chishm - Sun Aug 13, 2006 4:23 am

I've been using the same 512MB card since I got my GBAMP over a year ago. It still works great. I'd be more worried about the lifetime of the connector inside the GBAMP than the block-erase lifetime of your CF card.

By the time your CF card exceeds its block-erase lifetime you should be able to buy a new, equivalent sized card for less than half the price (assuming average usage and continuing decline of card prices).
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#98098 - Mr. Picklesworth - Sun Aug 13, 2006 5:55 am

I have one 512 card that seems to become a complete mess of corrupted data if it becomes too fragmented.
Writing big files, removing them, and writing new files often breaks other files and I am forced to reformat the entire card to fix the problem.

This card has been through a lot, though!
...Survived longer than my last hard drive, in fact :P
Went through two digital cameras belonging to a professional photographer, and was originally the only card he used. (LOTS of pictures).
I ran a very poorly written and bulky program directly off the card, which did a lot of writing to files.
Did much DS stuff, but mostly just file viewing. I also run ScummVM games from it, but that doesn't involve much file writing.
I imagine that the problems are being caused by old age (5 years?) and having written some enormous files / clusters of files to it.
Nothing has disappeared so far, so that's a good sign!


My 128 MB card, on the other hand, has worked perfectly since the day before I got my GBAMP about 9 months ago... and it has been used to play/save Doom, run DSLinux (with a lot of writing, too), download homebrew, act as an FTP server, write design documents... and it has encountered more than its share of screwed up files. (Get this: Once, it had 2 GB of data on it! (Silly Ubuntu)).


Pointless life-story aside... Yours should last fine :)
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#98118 - JaJa - Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:12 am

Yup, each sector has a life span of like 100000 reads.
There are some spare if a sector fails prematurely.

Basically don't worry.
Even if you were to erase and write to the whole card 6 times a day it would still last about 46 years, much longer than the life of the DS.
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