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Will P2 ever fail?
I thought I would post this to see if anyone had some thoughts?
P2 cards or flash based media storage…..Will it fail? What I mean is a spinning hard drive will eventually fail, some sooner than others. But, they will all fail at some point. Same with optical media. Will flash based storage ever fail? Or what is the projected lifespan? With no moving parts and being solid state, can it last forever if stored correctly? Or… for a very, very long time? Anyone have any experience or thoughts on this? If I have a bunch of archived footage on a hard drive and I know at some point it will die or if I can archive to a flash based media storage that will never fail then it would be better to archive onto the flash base media even at an added up front cost correct?
Lets not talk about changing codecs or OS compatibility, just the reliability of long term storage use of flash based media. I know the cost needs to come down and capacity increase, but that will happen in time, maybe sooner rather than later, i.e. 5 years or so as the market drives it forward.
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9 Replies
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So far ours hasn’t. But who knows? Only time will tell. Some people have had issues with P2 footage, but the cards have seen extreme cold (The Ididaron race in Alaska) and extreme heat (several docs shot in Africa) and came out gold.
We have used the cameras for several battle re-enactments and actors crash into the cameraman and camera all the time. No problems. GREAT footage to use.
But, just like with Plasma TVs going green…we don’t know until time marches on and we see what happens.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Yeah, thats exactly wha I mean….this type of acquisition seems pretty foolproof
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But, does anybody have any data on expected lifespan of a card? Or of flash media in general? Does it dissolve over time? Can the silicon melt? I am sure at a high enough temp, but what if it is left in a hot car? Would that affect it? Again, just curious if anyone has more insight on this or personal experience?
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Worst I’ve had ’em is in 130-degree heat, and at about 60 below zero. No problems at all. I guess a car dashboard in Vegas could get up to maybe 150 or 170 degrees, so I can’t comment on that, but in any rational shooting circumstance anywhere on this globe, they’re going to hold up flawlessly.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
I forget what Panasonic says, but the cards are good for 10,000 insertions or so? That’s not the media itself, it’s the electronics/parts and solder that hold the guts together and transfer the information to the storage.
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I think it’s 100,000 read/write cycles and 30,000 insertions?
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Yeah, that sounds more like it…that’s probably the closest answer you’ll get jaru22.
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Just to add a specific testimonial to this thread, we had our two 8 Gig cards rolling in the same room as an electric arc furnace at a steel mill recently. When they fire up that arc furnace, the power lines that supply electricity to the furnace have a total of something like 60,000 kilowatts running through them, and create an incredibly powerful field of electromagnetic energy (the grip said he actually saw a C-stand move an inch or so on its own). During the initial surge of power, the camera stopped working, but once that surge was over, the camera powered back up and recorded to P2 without any more issues. We didn’t lose any media and were able to go on shooting. I’ve seen tape shot in the same situation and the electromagnetic field caused constant interference with the image on tape.
Joe Murray
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Now that is a glowing field test if I’ve ever heard one.
Thank you for sharing.
Jeremy
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