[seningen]

Flash memory actually does have a wear out time. They are designed to compensate for memory that does wear out by remapping locations and other techniques.

How does flash memory work? - Explain that Stuff

In addition, all semiconductor devices have long term reliability degradation. In the simplest terms, the transistors age and slow down. This is statistically compensated for with increased voltage, but sometimes the increase is insufficient for the aging. Sometimes the wires connecting transistors break down due to electro-migration.
These are all factors that go into the design and working life estimations of electronics

Mike

Originally Posted by thstone

This SD card cost me 3 hours of troubleshooting Sunday! (damn those things are small now!)

After not getting any of the three past races on video, I wanted to finally get to the source of the problem. Previously every time that I thought that I had it fixed, it happened again (and again).

I spoke to Brad Roberts and he said to update everything to the latest firmware and then if its still a problem, its the SD card.

Now, I have great respect for Brad but thought it was weird that an SD card that had worked perfectly fine for two years all of a sudden starts to fail? I had never heard of this - SD cards don't wear out (at least not in this type of consumer application). But, what the heck, I wanted to get this working once and for all.

I started by updating the camera firmware and the configuration app to the latest versions. Easy, breezy.

Next, I configured a test setup that worked the same way that the camera is controlled in the car (the camera is supposed to turn on automatically when 5vdc power is applied through the mini-USB connector and turn off when power is removed. The Traqmate data system supplies the power automatically so the video and data is synchronized).

The camera worked fine for the first two rounds of tests (the camera automatically creates an individual 1.1GB segmented video file roughly every 10 mins. I also started and stopped the camera a few times to re-create track sessions).

Close to the end of the second test, it simply stopped recording and lost all of the configuration data so all subsequent attempts to get the camera to record were fruitless. This is exactly what kept happening at the track. I had to re-format the SD card and re-set all of the config settings to get the camera to come back to life.

The good news is that I was able to re-create the problem and it looks like its either the data card or the camera itself.

Then I swapped the old SD card for a new Patriot 32GB Class 10 card and started re-running the tests. Thus far, I've been able to record almost 50GB of video without any problems.

Testing will continue through the week until I feel confident that it will work. Then I'll do some in-car testing this weekend just to make sure.

I think that I'll smash the old SD card with a sledge hammer just to make me feel better.