I've been experiencing a high rate of cabinet and flash card failures on communication servers 5 to 7 years old. Anyone else? I'm aware of the defective ScanDisk flash drives, but more concerned of the cabinets failing. We've replaced 15 within the last six months. And yes we tried shorting out the battery leads before replacing the cab. For those that don't know; ESI tech support recommends shorting the positive and negative leads after removing the battery which sometimes brings the cabinet back to life.

We've had the same issues.

Haven't seen high cabinet failure rates, but I have replaced many flash memory cards of that age.

I read somewhere that currently flash memory have limited write cycles. Usually this is in the order of 100,000 write cycles today and SD cards include circuitry to manage wear-leveling, that is, spread out writes over the storage media evenly to avoid "hot spots"—pages that are written too frequently and therefore failing early. Thus if the card is 10 years old...

Of course some manufactures are better than others. Personally for my DLSR I use SanDisk because my photos are importand and I don't want the card to fail and also for my cell phone: SanDisk.