Railfan Technology > Storage disks capacity

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am somewhat leery about using these larger capacity SDHC cards.  I have purchased a 32 GB card but haven't tried it yet.  Are  there any issues with these larger capacity disks, other than the "if you loose it, you lose a lot more data" situation?

TIA

Robert

I've been using 32 gig SDHC cards in my HD video cameras for years. No problems at all. They work just fine.

I also use an off-site backup system for everything. Once I transfer the video scenes into the MAC, they get backed up using crashplan.com. Then I reformat and re-use the cards.

Depending on how new your camera is, the firmware in the camera may not be able to access all 32gb.  If your camera is less than about 7-8 years old, you should be in good shape.  However, check the user manual for your camera to be sure.  If you can't find it, it should be downloadable from the manufacturers website.

And yes, if the 32gb card 'goes bad',  you stand to lose a very significant number of images.  Do you really want to risk losing an entire vacation worth of images, or several days worth of shooting in Chicago, for example?  The choice is yours.  Based on what I've read on various photography-oriented websites, most professional photogs not only shoot with two cameras (in case one goes bad, and they sometimes do!), but they generally limit their memory card size to 8 or 16gb.  That way, a wedding, for example, would still have most of the pictures OK if one of the cards failed. 

For what it's worth, depending on the manufacturer of the card, it may come with a one-free-download card (with 25-character PIN number) to access recovery software from that manufacturer.   That's one of the reasons I use nothing but Sandisk, plus, they've never failed for me  There is also commercially available recovery software as well.  I tried a couple of them before finding one that worked accurately on USB thumb drives.  I would assume they'd work as well on SDHC or even CF cards.  Note that the demo versions of those recovery programs will stop at some predetermined number of MB recovered, etc, to force you to buy their product...usually for $20-40 or so.

It's not a disk, it's basically RAM, aka solid-state memory. Very reliable.

I have a 64Gb card but When I use it a lot, I still download it everyday.  When I was in Europe last year, I would download at the end of the day, then make a copy on a thumb drive.  I didn't erase the card until I got home.  Never had a problem.  There is a lot to loose if you don't do downloads and backups on a regular basis.  A friend's daughter made a trip to Japan for a college class she was taking.  She took about 2000 photos and didn't do any downloads.  Someone stoled the camera with the memory card in it.  She lucked out.  They recovered the camera withthe card in it and all of her work was still there.

John
 

I have been using the SanDisk Extreme-Pro 32GB SDHC cards for several years now in my Nikon D600. I use the larger size cards because of the size of the RAW files plus the write speeds of the Pro cards (up to approx 90mbs). I have never had a problem with the cards and they do come with the free data recovery offer (never looked into this further).  I don't know if the data recovery offer is available with the SanDisk Extreme cards, as it is with the SanDisk Extreme-Pro cards, but I found that if you purchase the "Pro" cards from a store like B&H, you can get them for almost the same price as you can get the slower Extreme cards at local retailers.

I shoot some photos a couple days each week, but I usually wait a 1-3 weeks when I have a couple hundred photos to download at one time. Except for on a long vacation, I don't try to fill up the card.  Shooting RAW at 24 mp's the camera esitmates room for about 530 photos on a 32 GB card. In practice, the card can hold almost 1100 by the time it is filled up.

Gary

One thing I always do with the large capacity cards is format them in FAT32 and not quick format mode. I have had a couple of times where an image did not properly load leaving gaps or discolored sections. Then I reformat the card in the camera before use.

The reason for this is the software in the camera for formatting is very basic in what it does. The computer formatting is very thorough in testing the memory on the card. No card is perfect and the chance there are defective segments increase with the size of the card.

The computer software maps the defective sections and locks them out from ever being used to protect from creating defective files. This is pretty quick and cost free insurance.

Another great workflow is to never remove the card from the computer until all files are loaded. My D800E raw loads nearly 700 images to a 32G card. Say you want to process the last 4-5 of 600+ images. You put the card into the computer then scroll through the frame boxes to the ones you want. The program loads the images you want before loading all of the images ahead of the last ones. Then you copy to a folder so you can work on them. So now you want to remove the card but it is not done downloading the card. If you remove the card you may corrupt some of the files not fully loaded.

Just be really careful with your workflows and files.

I have a seven year old Nikon D5000. I have it set up for RAW and jpeg at the same time. It will write images to a 64GB SD card but will not write video to it, I also cannot take self timer pictures with the 64 G cards so I never bought any more of them. My D 5000 will write video to a 32 G or lower SD card with no problem. I save everything to an external hard drive, every day on a trip or after taking a lot of pictures in one day. I use Micro Center SD cards. In taking thousands and thousands of pictures on dozens of various size Micro Center SD cards I've only had two images that did not write to the cards correctly.

That's interesting about the way you format fbe. I will have to try that out next time..

Jim

trainjunkie Wrote:
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> It's not a disk, it's basically RAM, aka
> solid-state memory. Very reliable.

Yeah, I accidentally keyed disk when I meant card.

Thanks to all who responded.  Being older, I am still leery of some of the newer technology.  As much a Trekkie as I have been, I am still in awe over the latests tech.

Rob

OregonOldGuy Wrote:
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> Yeah, I accidentally keyed disk when I meant
> card.

I only mentioned it to clarify since there actually were memory cards at one time, namely Compact Flash Type II cards, that actually had a spinning magnetic disk inside (MicroDrive). That concept seems to persist today and sometimes confuses consumers who don't understand the difference between megnetic spinning media, and solid state memory. The former was not terribly reliable while the latter is. Fortunately, not an issue with today's cards.