Every day our digital cameras and mobile phones capture pictures and videos which are often irreplaceable. Many devices now take a very small memory card called the "micro sd" card which is about as big as a fingernail, but just how durable are they? To be honest this isn't a question that popped into my mind until I got an email one day with the title "[Review Request]: Indestructible SD Cards" from an online retailer called the Memory Card Zoo. Usually I am very careful with micro SD cards as they always seem so easy to lose! However this seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, so together with my good friend Georgina Parsons (a.k.a. Spiky) we set about testing one to destruction.
The memory card I was sent was a Samsung Micro SD (class 6) - Essential 8GB SDHC which retails for £10.79. The packaging states that it is water proof, shock proof and magnet proof, but what about more extreme tests? We put some "treasured memories" onto the card, some photos and a video and then drove over it.
Bizarrely it survived unscathed! When the card was put back into a machine the video could be played and the pictures were saved. So how about a magnet? Again the card survived unscathed. Everything worked! So Spiky decided to hit it with a hammer, and oddly enough this did not seem to do the micro SD card much good.
So unless you are planning to hit it with a hammer this micro SD card seems to put up with quite a bit of abuse, after all the phone it is in may be replaceable but what is on the card is not always. I still think there is a bigger chance of just losing these tiny cards though, maybe one day someone could invent a micro SD card that helps you locate it!