Except the high endurance microSD cards have real world performance feedback in stressful environments such as dashcams, action cams & most importantly:
- Designed specifically for video monitoring cameras (dash cams, surveillance & security cams, CCTV, body cams, etc.)
over numerous recording cycles.
I am not sure you can say that about a usb thumb drive esp. one that heats up as much as the Samsung FIT (I have one).
and I'm not sure you can't.
Especially when, again, you're only recording 1.5MB/sec....not multiple 4k video feeds.
The keys in question are frequently used for things like boot drives in small servers, and see plenty of action.
SD cards use flash memory. USB keys use....flash memory.
The idea SD cards are somehow magically "better" or "specially designed for" video makes no sense.... mostly SD cards are used for dashcams because they're
physically smaller so you can slide one into a slot in the camera instead of having a key sticking out of it.
Granted there's certainly different levels of flash memory quality and type- but samsung isn't putting junk in either.... (one way you can tell they're similar quality is the warranty, operating temp range, and condition resistances are all identical) and when talking about writing files that are a tiny % of a 128GB storage device you'd be looking at likewise tiny differences that won't matter to most unless you're keeping the car for decades...
The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte
These guys did endurance testing on both TLC and MLC flash (what you'll find in decent to higher end flash storage devices like both the USB key I listed, and your more expensive SD card).
TLC is the "worst" so let's look at its math...
So in a given hour you record 5.4GB... to cycle through 128GB once you're talking over 23 hours of recording. 3000 cycles, the absolute low end for TLC, gives you over 71,000 hours of recording.
Let's say you are recording for 10 hours a day (8 hours at work, hour drive each way) though it'll likely average out to less with weekends, etc).... so that's 3650 hours per year.
71,000/3650= 19.45 years before even the low-end of life for the lesser type of flash memory. Or still over 8 years if you ran the cameras 24/7/365.
And again that's at the
low end of the endurance cycle range for the
lower spec type of flash used in most keys/sd cards.
