sdcard & NAND-Flash memory life is usually dependent on:
- temperature (too hot or cold may cause data loss)
- sdcard Flash cell type
- sdcard internal controllers' wear-leveling strategy
- sdcard larger capacities tend to spread out wear if mostly empty
- file-systems like F2FS on average have shown to improve operational life by 70% or more
SLC (Single Level Cell)
- Industrial uses
- 50k to 100k write cycles
eMLC (Enterprise Multi Level Cell)
- noncritical industrial uses
- around 20k to 30k write cycles
eMMC as pSLC (a.k.a. 'pseudo-SLC').
- is usually just MLC flash configured to only use states 3 or 0
- around 20k write cycles
MLC (Multi Level Cell)
- each cell holds 4 different charge levels per cell
- around 3k to 10k write cycles
TLC (Triple Level Cell or 3D cells)
- each cell holds 8 different charge levels per cell
- some TLC based SSD drives use SLC caching areas
- typically around 3k to 5k write cycles
- Warning: can be as low as 300 write cycles for some chips