Re: Memory Stick Life Span

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.

.

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