I’m not sure if it was me (but it’s possible…I did post something about SD card usage between V2&V3 recently though), though I have recently put a lot of thought, consideration, and research into this out of curiosity. It seems to me that SD Cards should theoretically be a better deal (if you only care about the possibility of reviewing recorded footage)…in practice is another matter though (sometimes they die sooner than they theoretically “should.”
It can be so hard to calculate since the answer changes a lot depending on several variables:
- SD card type (Single Level Cell/Multi Level Cell [ie:Triple-Level Cell])
- SD card controller (wear levelling)
- SD card size
- File system
- Card manufacturer/quality
- Luck
Then you take into account your Camera use:
- Are you running V2, Pan, or V3
- Are you always in HD, or SD, or 360p
- Is it always on daytime (more FPS?), or nighttime (fewer FPS?)
- How much action there is also seems to change things a little for some reason (which doesn’t make sense to me).
Guesstimates place SD card life cycles on the order of 100,000 writes on average before wearing out.
V2’s use ROUGHLY 9-10GB/day when in HD. We’ll say if it’s always on daytime mode (instead of auto) it’s usually 10GB/day.
My first V3 showed to use 10.5GB per day in similar conditions to the V2 that was getting 10GB/day.
So, if you have a 32GB card, and have a V2 recording nonstop, you’ll use every sector of the card on average once every 3.2 days. With 100000 rewrites of each sector, that means the 32GB card could, in theory, last 3.2days * 100,000 = 320,000 days. 320,000/365 = 876.7 years to wear out every sector.
Even if you have a card that only takes 30,000 write cycles…less than one-third of what many believe is the “standard” 100,000…that’s still 263 years of recording use.
You could argue that read cycles will reduce this a little and so will other things, maybe deleting, or overwriting or whatever else, but even if you cut that in half, that is still a theoretical use of 131-438 years of constant writing to the card from a Wyze cam.
In practice, SD cards can’t last that long though…the point of the above is simply that using them in a Wyze cam to constantly record won’t use up the Read/Write limitations of any card’s lifespan. Like most semiconductor cards storing information in Flash Memory, the SD cards will likely go bad for other reasons first. The current technology with normal usage says a card should expect a lifespan of roughly 10 years (per the SD association). Some will go bad before that, and some can last longer than that. Again it depends on many of the factors in the first bulleted-list. Some really cheap cards don’t do wear levelling well (spread out which sector is written to how often, and so they will actually wear out and die faster), and a few other factors. There are things you can do to extend their life a little too, but usually if you have any sectors going bad, you might as well just get a new card.
So:
- $10 for a 32GB card that should theoretically last upward of 10 years recording everything 24/7, but limited to 12 second cloud recordings & motion notifications once every 5 minutes (though you can get more with sound events, and automation events, and you can improve the experience using detection zones), You may miss many events you care about unless you watch all the video yourself.
VS - CamPlus which will cost more than that EVERY year ($15/yr or $150 for 10 years), won’t record everything 24/7 but should record most things you would actually care to see and will give a ton of extra benefits from the AI analysis. It is also WAY more convenient to save stored footage elsewhere (I save a bunch of my indoor footage to Google Photos for example, and with CamPlus I can just share it to Google Photos directly with the original quality without having to sit there and babysit the entire recording with manually clicking start/stop and sometimes miss recorded frames from lag while it replays, etc).
I have and use both, even in the same camera (some cams have both CamPlus and an SD card too). Partially this is because I like having redundancy and failsafes (sometimes CamPlus fails to upload, or if internet goes out, or motion detection wasn’t significant enough, or many other things).
Anyway, whether one is better than the other depends on a lot of factors, including what your own personal use-case priorities are.