Re: Memory Stick Life Span

ASAAR wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 12:58:48 GMT, David J Taylor wrote:
>
>> sony "memory stick" premature failure
>>
>> produces 650 hits in Google.
>>
>> I wonder if when the stick becomes full it takes longer to write, and
>> early removal from the camera or card reader causes the problem?
>
> Only mechanical drives are likely to take longer to write as they
> fill, due to seek times, especially if there's fragmentation. Flash
> RAM shouldn't, except for one thing. If a camera stores too many
> files in a single directory (more than say, several hundred), reads
> and writes can become extremely slow if unlike Windows, real RAM
> isn't used for directory buffering. This used to sometimes cause
> large slowdowns on old MSDOS computers that didn't load buffer
> utilities such as SMARTDRV. I'd be very surprised if any but a few
> high end DSLRs use large RAM buffers for this purpose.

Fragmentation exists in both disk and solid state memory, requiring more
reads by the OS (whatever that is), so write times can be longer. I found
that having many files (more than 100) in a FAT-16 directory caused
noticeably slower write times. I do doubt this is the cause, though. I
was looking for something which got worse with time, to match the OP's
report.

David


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Memory Stick Life Span
    ... RAM shouldn't, except for one thing. ... If a camera stores too many ... files in a single directory, reads ... isn't used for directory buffering. ...
    (rec.photo.digital)
  • Re: Constant Freezing - Please help
    ... Gerry, you've been very kind and I wanted to let you know what else I have ... I did download the RAM test but have not yet run it. ... I could disable the McAfee site advisor (which ... Volume fragmentation ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: running Linux with no swap space (but lots of RAM)
    ... The buffering logic ... | into memory. ... Reading is does not create the same situation as writing out. ... By that time a huge amount of RAM is ...
    (comp.os.linux.development.system)
  • Re: disk or RAM
    ... run a benchmark to prove the mettle of his machine, ... an "old timer" might tell you the buffer in RAM is simply a multiple of the record blocking of the data file which is largely determined by the track/sector mapping of the particular disk. ... If the file was read sequentially it was necessary to provide enough buffering that the disk read could stay a block or two ahead of the sequential read through the buffer in RAM - most times 3-4 blocks worth of buffering was enough for each file being processed sequantially. ...
    (comp.lang.java.help)
  • Re: MALLOC
    ... This also makes it nearly impossible to use 1GB of RAM, because that 1GB has to be ... buffering using only 128K buffers, (64K each channel, CD-audio quality, 44.1K samples per ... >the pci card has a plx chip which provides dma facilty for data transfer. ... >i have input audio files i need to read the data from the files and store the audio data in an buffer. ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)