Formatting those CF cards
JMG-Galleries has an interesting article on the 5 Most Common Digital Photography Mistakes. An good selection, and I have been guilty of all 5. Of course I am very careful when changing lenses, so #2 hasn’t really affected me at all. Yet the one that I have heard many times and still don’t believe is “3. Not Reformatting Your CF Cards Between Use”.
I formatted my CF cards when I bought them; and that has been the only time I ever did it. I have shot many thousands of photos, and to this day have not once suffered corrupt data. Admittedly I have only bought CF cards that are not cutting edge in terms of capacity, and this in turn leads to them being more stable.
So of the question is, just how many people have suffered from repeatedly corrupt data due to not formatting their CF cards?
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June 19th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Well the problem doesn’t have to be “repeated”, it just has to be one time to ruin your day and ultimitely instill you with eternal paranoia. I have had this happen to me once. Since formatting regularly I’ve never had a recurrence. I do know of other friends that this has happened to as well. I’m surprised more people haven’t commented on this yet.
June 20th, 2007 at 7:04 am
I wonder if it could be an issue that effects some cameras more than others, based on their read/write software? With regards to flash memory, the only time I have ever suffered corruption ever, was when copying files to a USB flash drive and removing it without detaching it in windows first.
I agree that losing the contents of an entire shoot would lead one to being an obsessive formatter.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Inherent to Flash memory technology is the fact that sectors will inevitably fail eventually. According to wikipedia, “most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks… a typical user using a commercial device, such as a camera, with a flash drive will probably not wear out the memory for the effective life of the camera”
Of course, we may not be “typical” users, and the heavy use of the card increases the risk of data loss. Formatting the card regularly will instruct the card to find and skip over failed blocks.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thank you Eliya, that sounds about right.
I’m pretty sure that at least some of the CF cards have internal self correcting/mapping of bad sectors, but this probably isn’t perfect, and formatting would likely turn them up more often.