Knightshade
Well-Known Member
From what I've learned so far, many USB drives were not designed for continuous write and will overheat and eventually die because of this.
A easy way to pick a flash drive that is designed for speed and continuous operation is to look for the "endurance" micro SD cards. You need something with a V20 rating which means it can sustain 20MB/S continuous write speed. Don't bother with the maximum write speed rating.
The car writes at 1.5 MB/sec.
You don't need anywhere near 20MB/s sustained capability.
Nor is it writing "continuously" as even the crappiest USB drives can do 5-10 times higher write speeds than the car is actually writing at... which means 80-90% of each minute it's not writing.
Some quick math- if the drive can "only" write 10MB/sec (which again is significantly slower than average for even cheap drives) and it needs to write the previous minutes worth of video that's 30MB times 3 videos. 90 MB.
90 MB at 10MB/sec takes 9 seconds.
Out of the 60 seconds it has until the next one.
9/60=.15 so only 15% of that time it's writing.
85% of the time it'll be not writing.
Again- this is a software problem, not a hardware problem.
Another option is to just buy a M2 2280 SSD drive ($35 for 240GB) and add an enclosure for $12. That should be cheaper than the high class micro SD drives at the same size, and will easily outperform them.
A 128GB high class SD drive would be about the same price (and use about 10x less power and be physically smaller.
A 128GB high class USB key would be cheaper (well, ~same price for the device, but not require an adapter like the other 2 that cost more) and also be smaller and use about 10x less power than the SSD.
And since the car interface is USB2, and the car is writing at only a tiny fraction of even USB2 speed, there'd be no performance difference at all.
Indeed every type of recordable device including SSDs have seen the same sorts of problems like corrupt video, 0 byte files, etc.
Again, this is a software problem, not a hardware problem.
Only really reason to buy an SSD is if you need a massive amount of space (like >256GB) because you have a huge music collection and also want to do camera recording with a single device.
Personally I use a separate USB key for music and camera as I want the camera to have a dedicated port so one less point of failure, while the music key can sit on a hub just fine with charging cables also attached.
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