Odd memory card behaviour

LauraJ23

LauraJ23

Messages
14,759
Name
Laura
Edit My Images
No
A bit of an odd one this, never happened to before.

1 16gb cf card used in my 50d since purchased september last year, no problems at all.

Today card is in my 50d and I take over 600 photos at throckmorton airshow all fine. Get home only for my 50d to tell me card is not formatted andneeds to be to work.

So I try a card reader and card doesn't show up, thinking I have lost all the pics, in desperation I put the 16gb card in my 30d and all pics are there andthe card is viewable!

Weird :thinking:

Anyone had this problem before?
 
Dont know about the issue. But can you plug your 30D in to your PC so you can at least get the images off it that way?
 
Well at least you have the photos off the card and hopefully someone else will know about the fault.
 
Do you delete shots in camera? I find it best to leave all shots on the card, then after downloading reformat the card in the camera. I've never had a problem with any of my cards doing it that way. Much like a hard drive shots (ie files) would get fragmented, eventually the card cannot cope with all the fragmented files, hence operating the way I do.
 
michael23 said:
Sometimes I format it rather than deleting but normally o delete all. I might change to formatting instead. Kingston have asked for pics of the card so will be interesting to see what they say.
Click to expand...

I suspect they want to be sure that it's a genuine card :thumbs:
 
artyman said:
Do you delete shots in camera? I find it best to leave all shots on the card, then after downloading reformat the card in the camera. I've never had a problem with any of my cards doing it that way. Much like a hard drive shots (ie files) would get fragmented, eventually the card cannot cope with all the fragmented files, hence operating the way I do.
Click to expand...

:agree: Sounds most likely.
 
artyman said:
Much like a hard drive shots (ie files) would get fragmented, eventually the card cannot cope with all the fragmented files, hence operating the way I do.
Click to expand...

Files on a CF are deliberately fragmented. It's called wear-levelling. Each memory location on the card has a limited number of write/erase cycles. To prevent one bit of the card getting prematurely worn out, the controller built into the card spreads the writes out over all the memory locations - fragmenting the files.

File fragmentation is a pain on a hard disk and irrelevant on a solid-state drive. With a hard disk the read head has to move from one bit of the disk to another to find the next bit of a fragmented file. And, at several milliseconds for each movement, that can seriously slow down the read time. But a Solid-State drive can access data in adjacent cells just as quickly as it can access data spread in randon celles.
 
Just had a call from Kingston tech department and they will be processing a replacement for me. They are not totally sure what went wrong but are assuming an internal power surge causing damage and not to trust the card again.
 
It's not exactly the same thing, but I put an older SD card into an older SD card reader at my in-laws' house (without performing any operation on it, the driver for the card reader was missing), and when putting it back into the camera (switch camera off, insert card, switch camera on), the camera would say the card is faulty.

But after switching the camera off and on again, it would recognize the card.

The behaviour is reproducable, I tried it several times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top