Smc Life


Sadly, I only play it about twice a week, not counting testing my project.

Heh, I'm not a very mobile person. If I had my way, I'd sit at my desk 24/7.

I'm not really worried about SMC life, once it dies I'll get a new one. No big deal.
 
Delsabre posted on Apr 21 2004 at 02:40 AM said:
I'm not really worried about SMC life, once it dies I'll get a new one. No big deal.
Thats the whole point, they are being phased out, very soon they wont be manufactured anymore. No new hardware uses them, and even large chain stores like Circuit City are discontinuing them. When I first got my GP32 I went from store to store looking for SMC's, and the common consensus was that everything they have on the shelves, is all they will ever have, no more are on order, or will be ordered in the future.

This leaves ebay and specialty stores, and even those will eventually run out since SMC's have a finite lifespan.

I give it another two years or so before they get hard to find even on online stores. They have been replaced by better media. Imagine in 5+ years when your card goes out, how difficult it will be to find a new card.
 
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"MANY games write their scores and save files after each level"

You confuse RAM with SMC. You are also trying your best to make a problem of something which isn't a problem. The GP32 has been around for years and I have never heard of anyone who had problems with their SMC running out of charges. Even if you wrote to the card once per hour, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year, the card would still last for elven years, with the _lowest_ quality card.

But if you are paranoid, buy another SMC for £2 and leave the sane alone.
 
pip posted on Apr 21 2004 at 03:13 AM said:
"MANY games write their scores and save files after each level"

You confuse RAM with SMC.
Not at all, YOU are confusing RAM with the SMC. If you finish a level and get a high score, and shut your GP32 off (via the power button), and turn it back on and the score has been saved, then that was obviously the SMC NOT THE RAM.

and I have never heard of anyone who had problems with their SMC running out of charges.

Did you even read this topic? A couple posts up someone mentions their SMC card dying after only 46 writes. Obviously it was defective, but how do you know your SMC isnt defective but instead of lasting 46 it lasts 500 or 1000 or some equally random number before the "problem" surfaces.

And, of course you wouldnt hear about many cards dying after only a few years, most cards will last over 5 years easily, alot of them will last for 8 without problems. Wait about three more years, then you will definitly start hearing about more dying SMC's. And note that the GP32 isnt the only device to use SMC's, if you search arround you can read thousands of horror stories about SMC's dying after a year, or two (well not horror but you get the point) do a google search, you'll find em.

Even if you wrote to the card once per hour, 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year, the card would still last for elven years, with the _lowest_ quality card.

Actually the smallest erase cycles are 10,000 which will last a little over year and half at that ratio.

Averagely however, I write a good 50 times per day to my card in the course of game playing on the GP32, as I already said. I figured I wrote about 5-10 times tops, but I started adding them up daily and figuring out the average, and it amazed me, and thats only the games I KNOW write to my SMC, there are plenty that do that I dont know about. Which is most likely the average for A LOT of people, they just dont realize when games actually write to the SMC. So at 50 write cycles per day, your average SMC 100,000 writes, will last about 5 years. As I already stated.

Some people write even more, some less, it all depends on how much you play your GP32, and what games you play. PerfectFit for instance only saves when YOU tell it to. Dynamate saves after every level. LittleJohn saves everytime you goto the menu when a VRAM game is loaded. Etc...


But the # of write cycles isnt the only thing. Lets assume that you will never reach the # of write cycles that your SMC can stand. For the sake of argument.

Now, whats going to happen when some fluke in a game or program, or in your SMC renders it unwriteable. These things happen fairly often in the Flash Memory industry. And I have heard of a few people that it happened to here too. Now sometimes you can do low level formats or similar and recover your SMC, but not all the time. Or hell you accidently break your SMC for some reason, it slips out of your hand and someone steps on it, or any number of possiblities, its a very thin fragile card.

If something happens, be it lose of write cycles, a fluke with the card, or some other disaster, the point is, they wont be arround to get replacements. Its a little scary.
 
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Isn't there some sort of SMC > XD adaptor which could used if SMC was phased out, then you could use XD cards instead of SMC cards (only up yo 128mb card max though)
would this be possible?

I don't think we need to worry...
does one write count as writing a 128mb file to the card or does a 100byte file count as 1 write...
Also surely you would not get the whole card frailing all at once but just some unwritable parts of your SMC (bad sectors)...
 
yes, you can use a converter. Only upto 128mb, but you can use one in theory. No sure if one has actually been tried however.

An SMC is split up into blocks, a 128mb SMC has 8192 of these blocks. Each block has between 100,000 and 1,000,000 erase/write cycles (cards less than 64mb may have between 10,000 and 100,000 cyles). Once a block has been written to that many times, it will fail to store it's data. SMC hardware will detect this failure and mark the block as bad. The rest of the card will continue to be used.

Now, SMC's also use a technique called "Wear-levelling" - this is, even if the exact same place on the card is constantly written to (eg. high score saves etc) then the SMC will actually use a random block* each time rather than constantly overwriting the same block. This means cards will last longer if you don't fill them up to capacity. It also means 128mb cards are the best to go for.

* - within a 1024 block boundary (called a Zone, a 128mb SMC being split up into 8 of these zones).
 
dont worry, i've been using a really cheap and nasty SMC for years now - was in my Digicam for a few years and now im using it on the GP32, i must save to it about 100 times a day one coding days, and i play my GP32 a few times a week.

after a year or so its still working :D
 
Akuma no Houkon posted on Apr 21 2004 at 04:35 AM said:
Averagely however, I write a good 50 times per day to my card in the course of game playing on the GP32, as I already said. I figured I wrote about 5-10 times tops, but I started adding them up daily and figuring out the average, and it amazed me, and thats only the games I KNOW write to my SMC, there are plenty that do that I dont know about. Which is most likely the average for A LOT of people, they just dont realize when games actually write to the SMC. So at 50 write cycles per day, your average SMC 100,000 writes, will last about 5 years. As I already stated.
Let us assume you have a 128MB card and you write to VRAM 50 times per day as you say. 128MB Cards last 1 000 000 times per block and there are 8192 blocks. It will then last for 448 876 years, is that enough for you? The lights on the GP32 will run out way before that, and so will you. Even if you wrote to it once every single second of your life, it would take three lifetimes to disable it.
 
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I just sat here for 15 minutes reading all this.... My head hurts... People, we all move on. If the smcs dissapear, so be it. By then there will be so much better things. :(
 
mother in law???? don't worry. soon satan will come up from hell and take her to be his bride. hahaha ( just joking ) :D
 
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