Originally Posted by
Epitome Basically, every time I access anything on the phone that uses the card there are read/writes.
Not exactly. Looking at a picture, reading a book (unless the app keeps a bookmark in the book file) are reads, not writes.
- Do not defrag a memory card. This consumes write/erase cycles and shortens the MTBF considerably.
And does nothing. Defragging is used to keep from shuffling the read head of a hard drive all over the platter. It doesn't take any longet to read one block from the beginning of an SD card, then the next block from the end, than it takes to read them all sequentially.
- Use FAT32 instead of a journaling file system (like NTFS), which will write more often.
And it you want portable storage, and you run Windows, you
have to run FAT32 up to 32GB and exFAT above that. The other choice would be ext3 or ext4, and Windows can't read that. (Almost no one formats an SD card as NTFS - you'd have to do that in Windows [or possibly at the Linux level - I haven't tried, but if the device recognizes an NTFS volume, it's probably capable of handling an NTFS filesystem, even to the point of formatting it - but you'd be in a terminal app - normal "plug the card in and the phone asks you if you want to format it" formatting results in a FAT32 or exFAT format.).
- SD cards are rated to hold data at something like 10 years sitting idle, but a lot of environmental events can shorten the life considerably. Heat is an enemy.
Heat is the enemy of anything electronic, but if the card gets hot enough to lose data, the phone is getting hot enough to fail catastrophically.
And you missed another not-so-well-known fact. Android apps have to keep their current state at all times. (Some don't, but that's not Android's fault.) That means writing to where they're stored - constantly in some cases (scroll the screen a few times and that might cause 50 writes). So an app that's "moved" to the card could have the "keep track of where we are" code sitting on the card, and it's constantly writing. That can destroy a card pretty quickly - days, even. So don't move apps to an SD card.