The SD card is the part of a camera system nobody asks about, and the part that decides whether footage exists when you go looking for it.

MANTIS cameras ship with industrial-grade cards. Here is what that means and why we pay for it.

The memory itself

Most consumer SD cards use MLC or TLC NAND flash, which maximises capacity for the price. The trade is lifespan and durability under heavy use.

We use SLC NAND, which stores one bit per cell. It is more stable, faster and considerably more durable. Some manufacturer tests put the endurance of SLC-based industrial cards, meaning write and rewrite cycles, at up to 200 times that of consumer equivalents.

A vehicle camera writes continuously for years. That is the workload consumer cards are not designed for.

Temperature

Consumer cards are typically rated 0°C to 70°C. Outside that, performance drops and corruption becomes more likely.

Industrial cards run from -40°C to 85°C. A cab in a Scottish January and a cab parked in July sun are both inside that range, and both outside the consumer one.

What the card does when something goes wrong

  • **Error correction** catches and repairs errors during transfer, so a file does not quietly corrupt.
  • **Wear levelling** spreads writes across all cells instead of hammering the same ones, which is most of where the extra lifespan comes from.
  • **Bad block management** identifies failing sectors and stops writing to them.
  • **Power loss protection** guards against corruption when a camera loses power mid-write, which on a vehicle is not an edge case.
  • **Self-healing** recovers from logical errors without losing the recording.

Two cards, not one

Our cameras carry a 128GB and a 64GB industrial card as standard.

Configured to record to both at once, that gives you a real-time second copy rather than a single point of failure. It also gives 192GB of storage, up to four times what a single-card system holds.

Why any of this matters to you

Everything above exists for one moment: somebody asks what happened three weeks ago, and the recording is either there or it is not.

Questions we get asked

**Can I use a standard consumer card instead?**

It will work at first. It will fail sooner, it will struggle at temperature, and the failure will not announce itself. For recording that has to stand up in a claim, the risk is not worth the saving.

**Are industrial cards faster?**

Not necessarily. Speed Class ratings describe minimum write speed, which is a different property from endurance. We select for both, but ruggedness is the reason we use them.

**How do I tell whether a card is industrial grade?**

The label usually says so. Look for “Industrial”, “SLC”, and a temperature range like -40°C to 85°C. Buying from a specialist is the reliable route, which is why we supply them with the cameras.

**What does a consumer card failure look like?**

Unreadable card, corrupted files that will not play, or dropped frames during recording. Often all you see is that the clip you wanted is not usable.

**Do all MANTIS cameras come with one?**

Yes. Every camera ships with an appropriately sized industrial-grade card.