Reverse-engineering and analysis of SanDisk High Endurance microSDXC card (2020)

What kind of intense read/write nature you are talking about in a video game console? It just reads the game ROM from storage and executes it, there is nothing to write back, the game is not being modified in any way while playing. All these talks about wearing out sdcards in game consoles or raspberry pi devices in my personal opinion are partially because of people encountering poor quality cards - counterfeits. There is an sdcard in my car camcorder which must have seen thousands of full write cycles and still has no issues functioning despite all the operating temperature differences it endures due to weather seasons.

Safe is a multifaceted term. Essentially these storage media (I'm more experienced with solid state but HDDs may be included) the probability the data you wrote is the data you read is a function of how many program/erase cycles, how long ago that was, and naturally the part's specifics. For example, a lot of NOR flash is rated to 10 years at up to 100k cycles. But devices > 10 years old rarely make the news for their flash being dead. On the other hand, I believe there was a Tesla fiasco where their logs were wearing out the flash prematurely.

There's usually trends to look for in regards to that third factor. The lower the # of bits per cell, the higher probability the voltage level is still working the right range. Which is why so much flash is still SLC or pSLC capable. Usually this is more industrial. Then you have entirely different technologies altogether. NVRAM/FRAM/MRAM are various terms for extremely high (or infinite) read/write technologies while still being non-volatile (keeps its data with power off). I don't know how much of a drop in replacement those are. I think LTT had one of those on a flash drive a while back https://youtu.be/oJ5fFph0AEM, but it's so low capacity it'll probably be useless.

It may be possible to hack something up with a MR5A16A. It's a whole 4 MB but has unlimited endurance and over 20 years of endurance. It looks like it has more of an SRAM interface than NAND, but should be capable of saturating a USB high speed link. The drive would likely cost $75? TBH if there was a market it may be a fun project.

If you sacrifice some endurance you can go up to 1Gb per device which might be interesting. But the cost scales.

In the same vein as this I've wondered for a couple years now what the impact of flash storage longevity is on mobile phone performance over time. Felt like my Samsung S8 was very snappy when I got it, yet a couple years later things that used to be fast - like finding specific music, scrolling through the photos in my gallery, etc. - had slowed down considerably.

Could also just be software updates or other things causing this but there should be some component of decreasing performance caused by wear on flash storage.

As someone who's been in a position like this before, I suspect the author is angry at the manufacturers and feels they're not being honest by not providing proper specs. It's hard to spec out a project when no one will tell you exactly what their parts can do. It's like if you were trying to buy a light truck for work and intsead of telling you how much weight it could pull or how often maintenance would be needed, the manufacturer refused to say anything more than "it can tow a speedboat" and "it requires infrequent maintenance."

When i buy 512G microsd it becomes my property. If i need to repair or replace my property, it should be disclosed what technology i bought, so that i or my repairman could understand my property enough to decide a proper path forward depending on my data & other environmental devices.

The author needed to reverse engineer what could have been on the spec sheet...

For maximum clarity, is there a positive or negative relationship between warranty length and longevity?