Memory Card reliability / failure survey

I've become a bit curious lately regarding memory cards and the real or perceived reliability between brands and types. I'm finding it next to impossible to find any meaningful data on the subject, so I figured I'd start here.

Please post if you have experienced a failed memory card, and include the following data:

Brand and class (i.e. Sandisk Ultra II, Lexar Professional 600x, Transcend 133x, etc.)
Card Type (CF, SDHC, etc.)
Capacity
Time of ownership
Details (Feel free to include any details on how or why, such as the manner of failure or the camera it was being used in.)


This is a totally voluntary survey, so I'm not expecting any really statistically valid information, but I figure this is a good first step to getting a good idea what brands stand out as being more reliable than others. When I have enough observations, I plan to compile the data into a spreadsheet for further study, and I'll be sure to post the results here. Absolutely feel free to give me any suggestions.

Thanks for everyone's input!

bokchoi wrote in post #10410749
I've become a bit curious lately regarding memory cards and the real or perceived reliability between brands and types. I'm finding it next to impossible to find any meaningful data on the subject, so I figured I'd start here

That's probably because CF failures are so rare - barring the odd manufacturer's problems, like the Sandisk one earlier this year and Lexar's problem back in 2006.

The other problem with a survey like this is that a large proportion of CF failures are due to pin-bending. That can be caused by poor-quality cards, poor-quality readers or just plain user error. You can tell that the cards themselves are very robust otherwise the manufacturers wouldn't offer lifetime guarantees.

So I'm not sure how useful such a survey will be. Responder bias will mean that people who have had a failure will be more likely to reply. Human nature means that the card will be blamed for human error. People will blame the card for faults that are due to other equipment. Numbers of failures are so small that a massive sample would be needed to identify any trends.

Here's my data, for what it's worth -

Over 20 different cards of diffferent makes.
CF, Microdrive, SD, SDHC, Micro-SD
From 0.008 to 32 GB
On average probably 2 years for most of them
One failure - when I removed a CF card from a PDA as it was being written to.

It is occurring to me now that asking people for input from non-failures might not be all that useful, considering the sheer volume of them. It also just occurred to me that many people, especially professionals, have gone through many, many memory cards over the years, and asking them to tell me about their experiences with all of them might be a bit excessive.

Frank, thanks for your input; I'm going to adjust the survey to ask only for failures. You can see right away that I'm no statistician!

I've a bunch of different Sandisk cards. Never had any issues with any of them. The only card that has ever given me any trouble is a older Lexar. It worked perfectly in my Nikon, and continues to work perfectly there, but the Canon had all kinds of trouble. I would get about 1 out of 10 shots that were corrupted.

Fortunately I have never had that problem YET. I do know I read where SDHC cards seem to fail more than other types of cards.

I've been shooting digital for 10 years without any type of card problem.

Well, I did have a problem with one card.. I dropped it in a blender making Margaritas. It didn't survive.