I find that I down load to my computer all my pictures and never get to the full capacity of each memory card. About 25% usage no matter the size.
My question: If I keep erasing the pictures from the cards, is the first 25% of the cards getting used over & over & the rest of the card is not written to?
Solid state media like this only has a fixed amount of read / write cycles, correct?
Am I wasting my money by not writing to near full before erasing the cards?
I just have to browse the cards and download the new stuff each time?
SD cards are pretty quick but the XD cards are way slow and I have 2 camera that use them.
So:
Not worry, the cards will out last the cameras?
I’m wasting $$$ if I do not fill them so as to reduce the number of writes on each available space?
The answers to your questions will depend on the brand of the cards. If you use cheaper or no-name brands a card will not last as long or problems are more likely to occur. Note that there are a lot of fake cards out there, so you can’t always trust the logo on the card. Every memory card has a file directory and that takes up space and can get corrupted sometimes. It’s not a bad idea to save off all your pictures from a card and then reformat it inside your camera once in a while. You’re right that XD cards are generally not as fast. That’s my experience too. SD cards come in different speeds and higher speeds will cost more. I use all kinds of memory cards depending on what each of my cameras require, and my favorite is CF cards. I wouldn’t worry so much about whether to max out a card before erasing for reuse. Worry more about saving off those pictures that can be lost when a card goes bad.
I would not worry about it. SD cards and other flash memory are designed to use all of the card evenly, even when not filled to capacity, a feature called wear leveling, to prevent this problem.
I agree with chaoticbear with the added note that cards are often rated for thousands of read/write cycles, something you are extremely unlikely to reach. By the time you approached even a significant fraction of that the card itself would be obsolete and you’d have bought a newer, faster, higher-capacity card.
The cards are cheap, $10 on sale, and any storage media is unreliable. My strategy is use the card once. I think I can get a whole year’s worth of pictures on one. As I take pictures, I copy the ones I want to save into different folders on my hard drive. I can then burn CD’s of the folders. Thus for peanuts, I have the originals plus backups of the ones worth saving.
I find it amusing that when this rat went into his pack looking for a box to store his SD cards, he found a plastic box that 30 slides once came in.
I do ‘erase’ and also ‘reformat’ but maybe I should reformat 1-5? 1-10? every time?
I do not do anything in the computer, just use a 'reader to COPY only to the computer.
All messin with the card is done with a camera, not necessarily the same camera as I’ve found that a computer can mess up a camera card but I have never had a camera mess up a card by ‘erase’ or ‘reformat.’
is from the first line of the OP. I almost always get my pictures off the camera card in less than 24 hours unless I am on a long trip and forgot my laptop.
I do have a protocol that protects and stores and stores the processed pictures etc…
I just know nothing about the inside of a memory card.
So, maybe I’ll re-format more often, try to get good quality cards in the first place.
Thanks again…
Gus
So, opinions on frequency of ‘format’ in relation to ‘erasing?’
If you are willing to spend a little cash, you might want to give an Eye-Fi card a try. I bought one a couple of months ago and they are the cat’s pajamas.
You never have to take the card out of your camera. As you take pictures, whenever the camera (any model) is near a public hotspot or in your home, it automatically starts uploading your photos.
If your PC is on, the photos come down directly, and you see them popping up one at a time in the corner of the screen as they come.
If your PC is not on, the photos go to Eye-Fi’s servers and hang out there until you get around to starting your computer (possibly weeks later).
The advantages? No removing cards. Photos are uploaded without you even thinking about it. They apply a pseudo-geotag based on wifi network on your photos.
Now slightly more to the point: You can choose a “endless card” setting that simply ages out the oldest photos from the card as you continue taking photos. Since those were already uploaded to your PC months ago, you don’t worry ever about the card running out of space.
I take 10,000+ photos a year so that won’t work for me. The two modes of failure on cards are either right out of the gate or after lots of use. If your card is bad from the start you might end up with a bad card and have many failures. Or you’ll never hit a failure, they don’t happen too often.
I usually carry 3 cards when I’m shooting, and can often fill up an 8 Gig card or sometimes two if it’s a busy ski festival. But I can’t really rely on a single card or afford to use them once. A single use card isn’t an awful waste of money, and it may be practical for someone who doesn’t shoot too much in a year. I still think it’s a false economy; reuse generally isn’t a failure mode for SD cards.
Wikipedia suggests that all of them do, but my Google isn’t finding anything authoritative either way. If it helps, I’ve been using the same 2 GB card since 2007 without any ill effects.
Well, also from Wikipedia is this quote on the specification of the CompactFlash Card:
Now, if you continue through all the pages they have between CompactFlash, SanDisk, Secure Digital, SD Card Association, you find that SanDisk was the creator of the original CompactFlash Card in 1994, and was a founding member of the SD Card Association in 2000. So, essentially, yes. Practically all of the media cards have a wear-leveling algorithm of some type built into their controllers. Some, apparently, go as far as to move data that doesn’t change or get accessed often to maintain the wear-leveling.