How long do SmartMedia cards last?


I read on the Windups site that they have a guaranteed amount of times u can write to them before they start to deteriorate (like CDRW's) not sure how many though, its got to be in the 1,000's I would have thought. Thats why Wind' has a function to save desktop rather than doing it each time u move an icon, change background etc.
 
Smartmedia cards have an endurance of about 100,000 program/erase cycles. How it translates in real use, I really don't know.

In real use ´heavy´ use of the SMC will make it last for about 5 to 7 years. Which is more than enough because at that time we will all be using our PSP, GP64 or whatever that will almost surely does not use SMC.
 
Also, after 100,000 cyces, only the sectors that have actually gone through those cycles die off (well not exactly then....) that mens that instead of completely shutting down, the card has less and less space on it after time.
 
I thought that it was 1,000, but it is good that I was proved wrong in the up way :p Here is a claculation at 100,000 writes:

I think (this might be WAY off) that I write 10 times a day (to make sure that it is WAY more accurate say 40 :p) and that is 2,500 days or ~8 years.
 
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