Is it true that you can only write to a sony memory stick x amount of times?? If so, what is the average amount. I recall hearing this somewhere but I can’t remember where. Thanks in advance!
Never heard that. You may be confusing it with the expected number of write cycles, probably on the order of 10,000’s. I can’t see why there would be any hardcoded limit to any memory card.
And by write cycles I meant projected time between failures.
The only limitation I’m aware of is that there is a maximum of 512 files you can store in a Memory Stick’s root directory, whereas the subdirectories have no limits. I don’t think there’s a limit to the number of times you can write to a MS. The best source for all MS-related information is www.memorystick.org, though for some reason it seems to be down right now.
CF cards have a limit to the number of write cycles as mentioned by Telemark. IIRC it’s in the neighborhood of 10s of thousands. It’s not an imposed limit, it’s just the way flash memory works. I’d guess that since memory sticks are flash memory, there would be a similar limit.
Thanks everyone. I know that there isnt a hardcoded limit, I was asking about the amount of write cycles (just couldnt think of how to say it).
The number quoted here (10k) seems a bit low to me. What one often hears is 100k to 1M (source) erasures.
And it is also worth pointing out that this is the number of erasures/writes per physical location. I don’t know about memory stick, but I am aware that there are flash based storage devices that include load averaging in the hardware. Otherwise this can be done by software, by using a filesystem that tries to distribute the writes over the entire ‘surface’. (I’m not sure if this can be done with any of the FAT versions used with memory sticks, but there are file systems that do this (again, look at the link above)).