SD cards: how many? Fill them? Regularly reformat?.......

Richard G

Richard G

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I have one SD card for my X100. I have only ever had one card for a digital camera. I did reformat an old one from another camera to do the firmware upgrade. With each download of pictures I was deleting the images from the card, but started to worry that I was writing to the same part of the card repeatedly, so now I have been keeping them all. So a spare card looks sensible. But many here seem to have multiple cards. Tell me how I should be managing the cards including when to reformat. Thanks.
 
My Digital Guru friends say: Transfer. Back up the transfer. Format the card. Go shoot more.
I would add that regular swapping of the card will prevent an "Oh S&@ite, I lost all my pictures on this card." Regular as in daily, morning-afternoon, etc. Especially if you go on a very important trip.
 
Memory cards are so cheap now it certainly doesn't hurt to have a few. If I'm shooting a lot I "may" fill one card and start on a second one the same day but that happens very rarely. I usually download images from card to computer at the end of a day but if I'm traveling or lazy I may get get several days worth of shooting on a card before doing the transfer. It really doesn't matter. It's a good idea to always format the card (in-camera) when you first install it. This ensures that card and camera are talking to each other and that you don't throw your number sequence out by using an older card--if you use a card in the camera with an out of sequence number most cameras will pick up the last number on the card and start numbering new images from there; thus requiring you to re-number images and re-set the number sequence in the camera.

I don't know what you're using now but buy the best cards you can afford and don't go too large. Even with my Pentax K20D I only use 4Gig cards. This gives me about 180 RAW + jpeg shots; more if I'm shooting jpeg only and lots as far as I'm concerned. Sure the 8 Gig, 16 Gig and even 32 Gig cards are more convenient but when one fails--and it will, mark my words--you can lose a lot of shots if you have a full card that hasn't been transferred to your computer...
 
Always and only reformat in the camera once a set of images has been transferred to you computer and backed up.

A high quality card can be used over and over and over again without worry as long as you always format the card when it's in the camera.
 
Formatting is better for the card than not, I never understood the superstition not to?

I've been shooting digital, 50K per year, never had a good name bought-new card fail me. The only card failures I've had have come from suspect cards that people gave me with a used camera or something like that. Some people abuse them.

There are a lot of fake name-brand cards, I would be careful to buy from really solid sellers, not the lowest price online.

Also, if you carry a bunch of cards outside the camera, those are one more thing to loose, get stolen, or damaged. I don't know the odds, but you could argue it is safer to keep a large card in the camera rather than bounce around with a bunch of little ones.

Also Also, get a newer camera with twin card slots, like the Nikon D7000.
 
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I'll carry spare cards, but that's just in case the primary card fills up. The X100 needs fairly fast cards, so I got a UHS-I for mine, vs. the Sandisk UltraII + USB I normally use with my M9 and X1 (the have a folding design that exposes a USB connector, that way you don't need to worry about SD card readers).

Formatting is the way to go. Deleting files leaves entries in the FAT, doing a quick format in-camera starts you from a clean slate and reduces the risks of data corruption.
 
SD cards are cheap even the brand name ones as long as you don't go for the really fast ones which don't make much difference if your camera has a good buffer. I have a friend and he does not reuse SD cards. He pops a new one into the camera, fills it, file it and then buys a new one. He has never lost an image.
 
Rayt said:
I have a friend and he does not reuse SD cards. He pops a new one into the camera, fills it, file it and then buys a new one. He has never lost an image.
Click to expand...

Flash memory is not an archival format. The data on one will start to decay after about 5 years or so.
 
Rayt said:
Hey Frank, if you were referring to my post, my friend is neither, but ridiculous? Maybe.
Click to expand...

I would say it is pretty ridiculous. But then again, my mother recently called and asked me "where can I get a new card for my camera? this one's full." :9

She isn't Chinese either, btw.. Don't know what that's got to do with it anyways.
 
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