I have a couple VIxia camcorders that I have had for many years. (I think one of them is 9 years old and one of them is 7). I still like to use them because I can use magic arms to stick them around as fixed cameras.

Both of them have experienced random shut-downs recently. In both cases they were running on AC power, not batteries. (Though the older camera will shut itself off randomly even running on batteries). I have always recorded to the internal drive and then transferred for export, but recently I recorded directly on to SD cards just to see if that made a difference. I was pleasantly surprised that both cams remained recording for the entire 2.5 hours with no problems.

I don't know if this is conclusive evidence, but have people heard of glitchy internal hard drives causing the cams to just shut off before?