Recovering Files off Flash Memory

Camera Memory these days is seen as a hard drive, and so you should be able to recover it fairly easily using free tools, such as smart Recovery.  The most important thing is not to use the drive for anything else. Just like with a hard drive, even though it tells you the data is gone, it actually isn’t until the space on the drives where the files are located is overwritten. When you initially delete a file or folder, it just removes the reference to it, not the file itself. Only when the space on the hard drive/usb drive is overwritten is the data deleted. Though there are programs like SpinRite that can recover such files as well, so long as it hasn’t been very long since the files were overwritten.

Memory card speed for cameras

What they’ve done is that they’ve upgraded compact flash cards so fast that they are faster than hard drives. Cameras have built in memory for a buffer, and then they save into the flash card. The speed of which the camera writes to the card is correlated to your camera’s buffer. The speed of which the camera writes to the card depends on the buffer and shutter speed, not entirely the speed of the flash card.

 source: leo.am

How Long Will Flash Memory Cards Last?

Typically flash memory can be read and written 300–600 times. After that it will get unreliable.