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Memory Card Torture Tests
saikatguha266 writes "BBC is reporting that five types of memory cards were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car, given to a six-year-old boy to destroy, smashed by a sledgehammer and nailed to a tree. It was still possible to retrieve photos from the xD and Smartmedia cards while the others didn't survive just the last two tests. "
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right, coz it happens to me all the time, to nail a memory card on a tree by accident...
:)
Note that I did had a PS2 memory card go to the washing machine, and it worked like a charm afterwards. Thank God, I was not going to start FF7 all over again
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Sounds like these memory cards are about ready for use in the real world now that they've passed durability testing. Oh wait...
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
My only problem with any memory card was with a lexar memory stick for my digital camera, which just happened to stop storing photos 1 day into my first trip to Las Vegas. Reformatting didn't help. I think it knew that I would be forced into buying a card that would have half the storage and twice the price. (I should note that lexar did send me a free replacement, but that obviously didn't help me out on my vacation).
"Most of them did fail to get through two additional tests - being smashed by a sledgehammer and being nailed to a tree."
The number of times i've accidently nailed my high-tech electronics to a tree... anything that survives that most common of IT mishaps will be a real lifesaver.
I remember doing that back in 1982.
Oh, wait, those weren't memory cards. They were assembly language programs, when I should have been nailing higher level languages like BASIC.
you realy want to destroy one of those memory cards (compromising pics or whatever on it)... looks like your only chance is a sledgehammer.
At last, indestructible storage for my p0rn!!
no no no no. That was just your camera trying to honor the old 'what happens in vegas, stays in vegas' rule.
Although this only really applies to the nailed-to-a-tree test, where the nail goes through will matter. In DIL ICs, most of the area is taken up by connections to the pins. If these cards have the core close to the edge with the connectors, and a nail is put through the center, it could miss the core entirely. And if the nail went through the bridges, a data recovery person could wire a reader the the connectors inside the package.
is this a feature or a bug?
There's always the microwave in the employee breakroom. Guaranteed to destroy small electronics placed within - in a matter of seconds.
Besides the fact that "nailing to a tree" is something which is unlikely to happen to my memory cards, probably the outcome depends strongly is the nail goes trough the flash memory or only trough plastic. Furthermore "washing" should be carried out at temperatures from 30-90 degrees, and the results should be interpreted in terms of flipped bits. Hammering is a combination of mechanical stress and vibration, two things which can be separated (and are interestin separate- one tells you if you might put the memory card in your pocket, the other one if you should damp vibrations if you put it onto your bike). Running it over with a toy card after running it over wit h a skateboard (I suppose with sombody on it) will not do additional damage, i guess! And dipping into cola may oxidise the contacts......
So.... I think the test was not carried out correctly and scientifically......
While it is neat they held up to the test, I have had several just quit working and they had little to no abuse at all. One was for my wife's camera and one for my mp3 player...and neither one that went bad was probably much more than a year old.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
They don't survive being submerged in molten steel either.
Whats the point of all this destructive testing? Do you really need your media to be THAT tough? (with the obvious exception of military applications but they can afford to pay for that.)
My parents have about 50 baby photo's of me. I have about 2000 digital baby photo's of my daughter. However, if I am lucky 25 of those are really worthy of printing. If 2 out of 10 digital pictures really make it to actual print, I consider that a great deal. I would say that translates to booming business for the printing services.
Most ICs are surprisingly resilient. I remember hearing about somebody testing an atari cartridge to see what it would take to break one. He was trying to see if the arguement for the legality of ROM dumping as a way to backup your games in case they become corrupt really had any merit. IIRC he through it a couple stories onto the sidewalk, rolled over one with his car, hit it with a sledgehammer, dumped soda in it, etc. The case cracked earlier on, but I think the cartridge didn't actually stop working until the actually IC broke after a couple hits with the sledgehammer, although it did continue to work after the circuit board was broken.
That will kill it....
Regardless of these tests, the fact still remains that the vast majority of friends that have had memory cards fail have been using SmartMedia. Practically every person I know with SmartMedia cameras have at least one card that isn't working.
I've been using CompactFlash for a long time, and have yet to have a failure. I have everything from 16M cards (used to carry files around) to 1GB cards (hundreds of photos, filled only on vacation). I don't know any of my friends with CF that have ever had a card fail, though a few of them have had filesystem corruption (I blame that mostly on the devices, not the card).
I think it's odd that with all the things they did to these cards, they did not put them through a microwave. It's not like that would have been hard to do and should happen more often to cards than being nailed to a tree.
http://nyamenation.org/
CF cards usually stand a trip through the washer. Just let it dry (no, don't use the dryer.) If you use a liquid fabric softner, it might not work. The advice I got from a Canon rep was to wash it again, but don't add softner.
DB26
The dustbunnies are under your bed.....
Like the indestructible company car the company microwave will never be harmed. Dont do this at home script kiddies.
... for something from these guys to handle these.
The earlier versions of their FinePix line used Smartmedia and now the newer ones use xD cards, so they must know what they're doing. Fuji makes awesome cameras for not too much $$$ also!
Meh.
Anything containing sugar and phosphoric acid will cause damage over a period of time.
There.
To destroy your flash card:
Install a small httpd server on flash card and get it \.ed.
For an extra five (5) points, install Java (Sun) at the same time.
Still, those two cards are a bit out of style, since SM is REALLY old, and xDs are only used by digital cameras made by Fuji and Olympus, so I dont think they will find a great audience.
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
No matter what I used to give one of our CEO's, no matter how hard I'd tested it first, he found new and unusual ways to kill it.
That's the test I want to see: Can it survive a week at home with a mining company CEO?
The same kind of CEO who's password was always "password"....
There's always the microwave in the employee breakroom. Guaranteed to destroy small electronics placed within
;-)
I stuck in a spare magnitron I had laying around and it still works fine.
The truth shall set you free!
Its good to know that if Hillbillies steal my memory card and nail it to a tree to worship as a god, I will still be able to get back my precious pictures of last years Christmas party!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
... of a letter I read in a now long-defunct weekly computer magazine in the UK called New Computer Express. Printed on cheap paper, it attempted to cover all available platforms in one 80-page weekly magazine. This included everything from ZX Spectrums to the then quite new 486 PCs. Macs, Amigas, Ataris, Amstrad CPCs, you name it, they all had their corner in there. Great magazine. Only problem was, their letters page looked like the flamewar from hell...
One guy wrote in saying he had got fed of up how his friend was always boasting about his Amiga 500 and how it was vastly superior to any other machine on the planet, especially this individual's ZX81 Spectrum. So convinced was he, he proposed a test. He offered the letter-writer his Amiga 500 for free if he could come up with one test, any test of his choice, where the ZX81 outperformed the Amiga.
The Speccy-owner, sat down, had a think, realised what to do and called his friend over with his Amiga for the test to begin. The friend arrived, and was summoned to the back garden. The Speccy-owner took his ZX81 frisbee-style and flung it across the garden, landing it perfectly in a compost heap.
The Amiga owner stared at him, spun around with his Amiga, tried throwing it, fell over under the weight, the machine smashing into several pieces. The speccy owner picked up, cleaned off and plugged in his ZX81, and was playing Manic Miner in minutes. The Amiga owner was told to take his trash and go home, which he did, crying...
When it comes to destruction tests, you have to ask "what's the point?". My media cards are normally well protected inside cameras or PCs and are unlikely to be dipped in cola or nailed to trees. However, it's always interesting to see how things work outside of the environment for which they were designed, just like that ZX81 and Amiga 500.
shuffle your feet thru carpet with nylon footwear and pick up a memory card (in Minnesota in February).
Have my cat determine the memory card is alive and subsequently attack the memory card
Have a dog carry the memory card in it's mouth for a couple of hours; then bury the memory card in the back yard.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Much more real-world than even the dog chewing on your memory card.
:-(
Just insert the card the wrong way up into your card reader. Our Compact Flash card reader is not well keyed and allows this.
Instant card death on powerup
Anyone who wants me to destroy their valuable electronics, please contact me. I would be glad to send you lots of pictures, like this guy did! You know where to find me...
I want a blow by blow with video and what cards performed after what tests! I wanna see the pain in the media cards face when it gets nailed to the tree, and bashed with a sledgehammer!
Notice there aren't any brands mentioned (don't know about the magazine article it came from though). I'd bet anything that they bought the pricey stuff. Try those tests with PNY CrapMedia cards and see how long they last.
These guys have just such imagination. How about some real-life tests, like static electricity, X-ray machine, being left on the dashboard on a sunny day, being brought in on a cold winter day..
And if you are going to drop it in water, use salty water. After all, there are those things called "sea" and "ocean" and people get their cameras splashed when they play near them. Probably no less often then they spill soda on them.
Oh, and when you precious memory card falls out of your pocket while you are crossing the street, there are going to be tons of toy cars running over it.
Sorry, but: yawn.
Real tests would've included rewriting until the flash would die and counting the rewrites.
I think they didn't have enough real material to fill their papers (much of a recent syndrome).
I'd say the high temp test was in the boiling and washing machine tests.
Contrary to high radiation and strong magnetic fields these are Real Life situations.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Oh, right, my squidgard config file...
You know, I really don't think I'm going to bother setting up a proxy server just so I can correct the egregious aesthetic miscalculations of Taco and company.
Is there a CSS answer?
Talking about dropping, with a SD card I recently bought was a little folder claiming it would withstand a acceleration/decelleration of up to 2000G!
That's probably the sledgehammer test.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
... they do nothing!
I use XD cards in my camera. Nailing them to a tree might be a good idea LOL. They are so d**n small, you might lose them. I have to keep them in the little plastic case they came in, because in the bottom of my camera bag, is sorta like a womans purse! It's a bottomless black hole!
And I do mean bad, not just corrupted. I've seen more bad CF than anything else. Part of this is because CF is so popular. But another part is because CF lends itself well physically and as a market thing to making crap cards from crap parts.
There is a big market for low priced CF and a market for good quality CF. Compare this to a less thriving market like MemoryStick. All MemorySticks are essentially the same. The Sony and the Lexar ones are made in the same factory. And since MemoryStick is so small, you can't go buying up lousy old surplus flash chips and try to make a card from them.
I'm not trying to complain about CF either, if you buy decent CF it works great. On the other hand, I can't stand SmartMedia. It is and always was a poor standard. xD replaces it and is a better standard, I just don't think we need another memory format.
It may have been the USB controller that was damaged. The way that these drives were designed was that the connector was attached directly to the circuit board, without anything else holding it in place. Or, perhaps it may have been the flash memory that was faulty, like in your circumstance.
I think it looks a lot better than default mode. I'm the sort of person who cares more about content than (hideous) presentation.
-- $SIGNATURE
I nail my memory cards to trees all of the time.
So most memory cards are just as powerful, if not more so, than Jesus. Hmm.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Is this some kind of Christian thing?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Just use such a card as Knoppix home directory, work on it intensively for a month or two. You'll exceed write cycle limit of the flash memory and it will die without a squeak. That's how I busted my Nokia 5510 flash memory. First sectors are corrupted and unwritable.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Nice to know these cards are so tough. I've been struggling to think of some conceivable situations which might actually cause accidental damage. 1) Trip to beach (Lots of salt and sandy bits) 2) Immersion under pressure (dropped in swimming pool) 3) Magnetic fields (accidentally taken for an MRI scan) 4) Ionizing radiation (Multiple airport X-rays) 5) Extremes of temperature (left in car in winter)
This is not at all surprising, considering that these are solid-state cards, with no moving parts. If they had tried to do any of this to something like a CF MicroDrive, then it wouldn't have lasted even through the first test before it stopped working.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Who knew that Jesus would come back as a memory card?
Cell phones give off a small amount of Microwave radiation. And putting any consumer based product with ICs in a microwave will fry the gates. So, I would imagine over time putting memory cards in the same pocket with a cell phone might cause damage to the memory.
Life is not for the lazy.
I have a 128MB Trek ThumbDrive purchased in December of 2002. Since then, it has been dropped in hot coffee twice, been through the washing machine three times, and left at a business site 500 miles from home and returned via FedEx. The plastic cap is shot on it; this was a bad design to start with. The keyring was attached to the point of greatest strain, the top of the pocket clip. The keyring and pocket clip therefore broke off together, making it impossible to carry except in one's pocket. Two tiny plastic doodads keep the cap snugly on the device, until after about 6 months one of the plastic tangs broke off. Breakoff of the other is imminent. But the company where I work has several of these, and no one has ever lost data on any of them, except the clown who "accidentally" reformatted his in MacOS 9. I think I saw these recently remarketed under the Maxtor brand name.
iPods are just as survivable...
http://www.ibiblio.org/ses/washandgo.html
Moving it from your camera to your memory card reader. In my case it scrambled the data on the card.
Really, they should have requested evaluation cards and tested ten of each. Doing things like testing nailing to a tree depends a lot on where the nail is going through.
May we never see th
Giving the card to a six year old kid to trash is all very well, but what about a _really_ destructive force like a four year old? There's a good reason why the nearly indestructible Pelican protective cases are guaranteed against everything except shark bite, bear attack and children under five.
Place two cards under the rear wheels of a front wheel drive car. Set the parking brake. Drive.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I could not do anything with it in the camera or my Windows box. Couldn't even format it.
When the PC with the CF reader in it finally got a real OS put on it, I gave it another shot and was able to resurrect it.
Although with my current camera, 8 MB only holds 1 or 2 images. I use it mostly as a "reserve tank". If I put that card in I have to go from the "it's digital, shoot everything" mode to "save your last bullet" mode.
My cat doesnt need a memory card to start attacking. I swear she sees "ghost mice".
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
My dad dropped his camera in the lake while fishing. The camera was fubar, the XD memory cards still worked and I retreived the photos off them. I use them even today in my own digital camera, he hasn't got one now!
Jonathanjk.com
I'm not worried about the nail-to-a-tree test, but I am worried about the staple-through test. I've only rarely seen a tree in an office, but I've seen many lUsers who are given to some strange behaviors. I've seen them staple through a 5.25" to attach it to a document. What would come of a staple-to-docuemnt for these media? Why didn't they test that?!
Now I'm going worry so much that I'll have problems sleeping, followed by curling up into the fetal position in a dark corner, rocking myself back and forth whispering "Rosbud," until they give me my Thorazine.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Circuit boards are washed during manufacture in something closely resembling a dishwasher, using orange oil. Puting them through a home dish washer is nothing special.
Oh well, what the hell...
The Zx81 and spectrum were two different machines. I'd bet a zx81 would survive more abuse than a speccy as it's smaller and lighter.
Also, until last year there was no manic miner for the Zx81.
Virtually all electronics contain metal. Placing metal objects in a microwave oven can pose a fire hazard and can damage the oven. Google Answers has a discussion on the presence of metal racks in some microwave ovens.
aren't memory cards supposed to be INSIDE computers?
When's the last time you dunked your whole computer in coffee?
(For some of you, probably recently.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
they are talking about flash memory cards that are used in things like cameras and USB thumdrives, illiterate dipshit
Bruised and beaten, nailed to a tree, this memory card died and rose again to free your soul.... what was the article about again?
I had a compact flash survive the washing machine and drier (permanent press cycle)! The Yellowstone photos came out okay in the end, and that flash card still works. The labels got a little rubbed off though.
I've had a friend that's lost a bunch of pictures on CF cards. I have a few SmartMedia cards and I've never had any problems with them.
The only real "problems" that I've had with Smartmedia cards has been availability of them. Most stores that I go to have a ton of CF, MemoryStick, or SD cards. If they happen to carry Smartmedia, they are usually sold out. Did this format ever go beyond 128M and what is the reason for its demise?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
and after I pooped it out it worked fine!
word.
What I wouldn't do for some mod points. That's just funny. You'd think he was kidding, but no, it works.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
back-slashdotted? omg!! a windows user!!
Keith D.
hand card over to TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) and ask them to "be careful -- it's fragile"
pass card over retail store checkout counter magnetic pad
microwave card for 10 secs
feed card to puppy (slather with peanut butter if necessary)
bury card in dust
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)