You are incorrect. Cards not designed specifically for video, have a high failure rate.
No, they really don't.
Your data set of "1 time, personally" doesn't change the facts.
There's nothing magic about "video" versus other data being stored.
And # of write cycles for a given type of flash is pretty well known.
As is the amount of data Tesla is writing to the card.
After that it's just math.
Even cheap cards of decent size should take
years to burn through available write cycles with a typical 8-10 hours of use per day.
And any good (even non "SPECIAL FOR VIDEO") ones much longer than that.
Here's some sample math.
TLC is common used in regular just "good" flash drives like the Samsung ones oft recommended (and which I've used without issue over a year now).
Everything You Need to Know About SLC, MLC, and TLC NAND Flash | My Digital Discount - MyDigitalDiscount.com
3000-5000 write cycles for TLC.
A write cycle is (generally) the entire drive being written to once. So 128GB written for my case.
The car writes 2MB/s total for 4 cameras, so 120MB/m or 7.2 gigs per hour.
Meaning 1 cycle would take ~17.77 hours....
So let's say you run the cameras an average of 9 hours a day...(8 hours on sentry at work, 30 minute drive each way) this means it takes about 2 days to use up one write cycle. Possibly you use it a bit more M-F if you hit traffic but you probably use it less on weekends- it's a decent average to use at least and you can do your own math for your own situation if you wish.
So 2 days per cycle, 3000-5000 cycles rated life.
That's 6000-10,000 days of life for the flash storage.
Which is 16.43 years on the bottom end, and 27.39 years on the top end.
Even if ran cameras 24/7/365 (172.8 gigs a day) the
bottom end lifetime of 3000 cycles still takes you just past
6 years of useful life.
Now make it a 256GB key and all those lifetimes
double
(there's some rounding errors and such I'm glossing over here to make the discussion simpler, but the basic math doesn't change significantly even if you wanna go into the weeds on that stuff)
Now, really cheap flash drives use even cheaper memory- maybe only 1000 write cycles on those.
That's still over 5 years for 9 hours a day of use, and over 2 years at 24/7 on a 128GB stick. Double for 256.
So if it makes you feel better to buy flash that says "FOR VIDEO" on it- it's your money.
But it makes no sense from a technical perspective for this application.
If you want to set up a system using multiple 4k (or higher) cameras that are putting down a LOT more data a LOT faster than Tesla is- that might well be a decent use case for "special" flash... but that's not what your car is doing.[/QUOTE]
