In article .at,
Anonymous Remailer (austria) wrote:

I wonder if you're not prematurely ageing your card by doing that.
Why not just delete the files, or have them automatically deleted
after you move them to the mdeia you're backing them up to?

Likely a format requires fewer writes, reducing the total write load on
the card, thus extending its life. The format doesn't need to process
each file individually.

neither does a delete. it just marks a file as deleted in the catalog
while formatting rewrites the entire catalog. the difference is not
significant and the number of writes is huge anyway. nobody is going to
wear out a card in normal use.

Oh, that sounds like the kind of quote that comes back to haunt
one. If "normal use" is light use then maybe, but if someone is
taking photographs, or using the card for whatever type of storage,
every day, and using a significant amount of the card each time,
then I think they might run into the limitations of the technology.
You might call that "heavy use" rather than "normal use," but it's
something that some of us do.

nobody does.

you'd have to hammer the card every single day for many years to get
anywhere close to the limit.

even pros who shoot thousands of photos a day won't hit it.