Hi All,

I'm looking for information about the lifetime of SmartMedia cards used in
digital cameras.
Some sources claim that they can manage 250 000 erase/write cycles, and some
mention about 1 000 000 of cycles.
Anyway, how to count erase/write cycles? Is one cycle equivalent to one
filling/erasing of the whole card, or to recording/erasing of one picture?

Does the controller in digital camera cares about uniform wearing out
of the card? If not, probably the lower addresses are used more frequently.
Even worse, AFAIK there is something like MSDOS filesystem implemented
on the card, so what about the FAT area? It is getting overwritten after
each adding/deleting of a picture.

Does anybody knows the technical details how digital cameras use the SmartMedia
cards and what is the effective durability of this media?
--
                        Wojciech Zabolotny
                        http://www.ise.pw.edu.pl/~wzab

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