Why Your Cf Card Might Fail At Your Next Shoot

Hmmm better buy a spare

When I was shooting with my Nikon D70s, my CF card failed on three different occasions. Luckily I never travel with just one card:)

Do you have a camera that uses a CF card Abbiee? I have only had ones that use

SD cards. That is scary for sure. I would hate to shoot a wedding and lose everything!

Well, I know this can happen, I just hope it doesn't happen on my next trip. Maybe I'll swap out cards every day of the trip so if something happens, I'll only lose half of my images....I don't want to think about it.

Knock on wood, it's never happened to me with either a CF card or an SD card. But you should always have more than just one. One thing I eventually began doing was never taking the card out of the camera to load the images onto the computer. The more you touch a card, it figures, the better the chance of something unforeseen happening.

I may make sure if I ever gt a new camera...way way down the road I will not get one with a CF card.

Wait, mine uses SD cards, I think...what's the difference between the two? Although I know any card can fail.

Mary the CF cards are those big square ones

"Sandisk is the Mac of the memory business.

They have the MOST money, the best hardware and software and the most innovative products. They literally own around 80% of the WORLD-WIDE CF market share! Why? Because they are the best. They also have the LOWEST failure rate in the industry!"



Glad to see that because all my cards are SanDisk

SanDisk has always been my favorite!

I think that's what I have too, but I have to go home and check after work. The one in my point and shoot in my purse is a SanDisk.

I still use CF cards I bought 7-8 years ago, and SD cards from various years, various brands (there are several good brands). I always take them out of the camera to read via a card reader. Never had a failure. Go figure.

Might be more of an issue or risk for wedding and event shooters.

Rapid firing all sorts of conditions from hot to cold etc like Zach

mentioned in his article. They shoot mostly weddings.

Actually, it is better to take the card out and use a reader to transfer the photos than to hook up your camera to the computer. Doing that has been known to fry the camera. I can't remember who it was, but that happened to someone in this forum.

It was Angelina, Linda. She was using the USB cable. Ever since she posted that, I take the card out of the camera and stick it directly in the computer to upload.

Linda that was Angelina.

I stopped tethering to my camera when my files would sometimes be half black in the transfer.

Mary we post close to the same time...lol

Folks remember, ANY card can fail. Just because you use a SD card, don't kid yourselves into thinking those cards don't fail as well. They will...Wedding photographers do themselves a favor when they shoot a camera that has 2 card slots and the images are written to both cards simultaneously. One can fail and nothing is lost...

Yes any card can fail. Not saying they can not. If I was doing weddings again

I would buy new cards and test them out for it. Take something to transfer as I

go. That is what I did on the last wedding I shot. Many factors can cause one

to fail as well. So one just never knows.

That article sounds like an advertisement for Sandisk and no matter what, these cards are still consumer grade.

Want a more reliable card? get a mil spec or industrial spec card from PSI, Amtron, Delkin Services, Monster Digital or Hoodman for industrial, medical, and military applications. It's the only way to go.

I had a 64gig Lexar fail.

I've used this to recover hundreds of gigs on a corrupt hard drive and it worked for some of the files on the SD card.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Whenever you delete something on a hard drive it just deletes the file structure but not the files and often when it gets corrupt and is not a mechanical failure it is just the file system and not the files that are toasted.

It can take forever for that program to run through hundreds of gigs of files and it seems a fair number of 'computer experts' who will charge lots of money for data recovery are not aware of this or maybe similar software. When a 1tb drive went haywire a computer shop told me it was only possible to get back about 200 gigs from a 1tb drive.

Though it took something like 24 hours that program recovered everything but the file structure.

Anyway if your card or drive is not physically broken, give that a shot.

If a chip or drive is corrupt or not recognized and you want to try to recover what is on it, DO NOT save anything else to it or it will likely overwrite the data on it.

Of course, use the above info at your own risk. Has worked well for me.

If I were shooting a wedding--which I never have and never will--I would not only have several backup/standby cards, but I would have at least one extra camera, even if I had to rent it.

You can't halt the wedding to see what's wrong with your equipment. It's a once-in-a-lifetime event and you better not blow it!

I had 2 cameras and one backup photog on my last wedding.

So glad I did not get into that full time too much stress!

what happened to that poor camera? it's like the freddy kruger model.
i just changed mine to a larger size. on the plus side if something does happen you can get a new card, most of the sandisk's seem to have a lifetime on it. tell them, send it back and they send you a new one. doesn't say much for what happens to the images though. and on the plus side if you never go beyond a certain amount (say you never went past 32gb, they get cheaper every year).

i always download my images to a hard drive on vacation, while not always the safest, it is a good idea. wish it was solid state, but i guess that won't happen soon. if my camera could handle the speed better i would install a SD card in there too, and have it write to both. in general i can do that anyway if i don't care about frame rate speed.

---Mike Savad

Never had a single problem. Maybe it's because I reformat the card, every time I put one in,which isn't mentioned in that article, re-formatting vs "erasing" the card.

If I shot weddings and had a camera like the 1Ds that has both the cf and sd slots, I would have "pairs" of cards,marked both, A,A and then B,B,etc., the same size memory and then keep changing the pairs out, when they got close to being full.

I had read somewhere,years ago, big difference between reformatting and just erasing the memory cards...........

Rich

I don't reformat. I fill a card, put the raw files on a Passport, mark the dates on the card, file it, on to a new one. No failures, no corruption, no problem.

Helpful post Andee,

I lost my trust in flash cards many years ago, when one became corrupted and I could not recover the images. Ever since then, I've always purchased smaller capacity cards (2 to 4GB) then spread my images out over several. That way, if one fails, I haven't lost EVERYTHING. Of course, this may be difficult to do if your shooting with a super high megapixel camera. Mine is not.

These CF card companies keep promoting large capacity cards. Buying a large capacity card only tempts you to fill it with images. If it fails you've lost them all. My advise is to stick with the smallest capacity card you can comfortably use and buy several spreading shooting sessions out over several cards.

That's a good idea, Arthur. If I ever leave Paradise and take lots of pictures, I will remember that.

At least some of the work would be saved.

Glad so many of your are finding interest in the article and topic. I think sometimes

we gt busy with things and forget. I use the format method for my cards before using

them again and hard once to format in camera not on the computer. And If I had

the money I would use a card only once but I do not. But If one shot weddings for

a good few or other you could add that into the price of your job..but I do not shoot

weddings anymore and only did a few. So much work!

I would like to add some insight to this topic if ya don't mind. I shoot raw files (NEF) Nikon D3X. These are HUGE files!

Any storage device can fail. Compact Flash (CF )and Secure Digital (SD) are just 2 forms of storage. CF card failure is rare. SD cards have been playing catch up to CF cards for the last 2 years. Not all CF cards are created equally!!

I read up near the top Joanne had several CF card failures in her Nikon D70. My question, was it a Kingston? Nikon has a list of authorized cards on the NikonUSA website. It's broken down for every Nikon body. For my D3X, an $8900.00 body, Nikon only authorizes San Disc and Lexar CF cards for most of their camera bodies. Before you purchase any CF or SD card you should research your camera body compatibility with the memory cards

I guess my original idea was correct. Buy smaller size cards and lots of them. That way one bad card will not ruin the whole shoot.

Lately I have been buying the 32 Gig. I think I should go back to my original idea. :) Even though I have never had a card failure. I also shoot raw...mostly D7100.

The problem is that if it fails you may not know it until you try to download the images. Or would you know that it failed when you review in your camera?

I own 4 Cf cards for my Nikon D300. The newest is 6 years old. The oldest is 8. I used them all on a recent shoot of an ocean powerboat race. All have been subject to extreme heat, high humidity and salt air. I am talking all day long in the dead center of the Gulf of Mexico mid-summer on the deck of a boat every day for weeks. Times about 30. Plus off the coast of New England in minus 10 degrees for weeks. I had one failure. I took too many photos on a card. Some of the files were corrupted. I lost them. It is a big deal since I was shooting a floating oil rig known as the Deep Water Horizon. Floating oil rigs are not very common and extremely expensive to get to. That particular one is at the bottom of the ocean now. So that is my CF card horror story.

Since there are no camera stores offshore I had to fix the card. Reformatting in camera did not work. What worked was reformatting in the computer followed by reformatting in camera. At the time I used to delete files. After that I always reformatted after every shoot. Reformatting in the camera does not do as complete a job as reformatting in computer but reformatting in the camera is still necessary after a computer reformat.. I have 2 8 gig Lexar cards and 2 4 gig San Discs. It has been 5 years since I had any problem. I recommend reformatting after every shoot. I recommend not shooting until the card is full which I did recently at the aforementioned powerboat race. My D 300 does not seem to allow shooting with a full card, but my D70s did. I guess at this point I am really asking for problems so i should buy a new card.

"And If I had the money I would use a card only once but I do not"

Andee, I get them on sale-Office Depot and Staples always has them marked down if you aren't choosy over brand. While the cf cards are mostly 4g, the SDs, which is what my A77 takes, are up to 16g and they hold a LOT of raws so they last a while. I'm leery of getting the 32g for reasons mentioned: what if they fail? They're expensive and would take forever for me to fill up these days any way.

I use only Sandisk. I've only had them fail on two occasions, and it was because I ate them--or tried to.

I had a couple of Wheat Thins in my hand and was snacking as I put a memory card in the printer to download pictures. When it finished, I took it out, switched it to my left hand, and about five minutes later took a bite out of it. There were tooth marks in the gold things on the card, and the card never worked again. Neither did the other one that I did the same thing to.

So far I have popped two memory cards in my mouth, thinking they're Wheat Thins. Both are ruined. Lesson learned. Other than that, I've never had a Sandisk card fail. But I never reuse them either. I keep them in the safe deposit box with small labels on each. They serve as additional backup and provide some peace of mind.

I'm thinking this article is not very good. For one thing they are saying the CF card is computer and therefore will break. I'd say not really, but the card is more than passive memory as it has a controller on board, but that doesn't make it a computer. (Your camera however, is an computer, and embedded one. ) CF cards are flash memory, which does wear out, but that generally takes 1,000's of writes.

Of course all electronics can fail. It's not clear to me whether CF's really have a higher fail rate than Sd cards or not. I might have to find another source to check that.

My three Nikon's all use SD cards and they are all Lexar's. My biggest problem is grabbing the camera and going to discover I left the SD in the computer slot - I don't carry a lot of baggage - usually just the camera - but I now have a small (relatively) camera bag that I got at a thrift that will hold my spare VR DX 18-55mm lens AND two spare 8g SD cards. I've never had a problem with my lexar SD's.

Connie I am surprised you didn't break a tooth on those things!

Never fill any memory card to its max potential.

Your not experiencing card failure, the card by default is attempting to write a new file over the filled one.

Lots of great forums out there folks to get all this info

I've never bought expensive cards. And, like Rich I've never had a card fail. I also reformat in camera after I copy the images off to my computer. Formatting the card will re-organize the folder structure and prevent database errors, that being the MFT (master file table) hidden at the root of the card. Formatting on the computer can cause its own set of issues. Deleting images off the card from the computer can cause database errors also. Canon users have seen the dreaded generic ERR-99 issue when deleting files from the computer and not in camera.

Proper care of the cards is important too. Try not to drop them, keep them in their original little plastic holders and not at the bottom of your pocket, that sort of thing.

Found this info on the internet :)

Jeff Cable is a photographer and Lexar employee and wrote an answer to this question in a comment on the post from a few days ago. Of course anything can fail.

“Every memory card does have a theoretical limitation to how many times it can be reformatted (less so on cheaper cards which use a lower quality of Flash Memory), but the number is huge. Unless you format your card 10 times a day, it should last a lifetime. And…of course…if you have a Lexar Professional card, it has a lifetime warranty and can be replaced if anything does go wrong.”

Of course anything can fail.

My question is: I have two slots in my D7100 Nikon camera that can be used as overflow or copy. If I use as copy does it write each card separately, therefore if one fails I still have the other?

Ok,,so I read thru all the posts here about what people do and dont do and card failures,,etc..I agree with chuck!

First off, Any Cf card can and will eventually fail..They do "wear out." I would replace them every 3-4 years. Why take the chance?
Second, Always reformat the card after you download your images, Never delete in the field. and reformat in the camera not at the computer..
Third,,each manufacture will recommend a card brand for their camera's,, I used sandisc for my canon. I know Nikon has recommendations too.
I use 32 gb cards now. I would recommend getting the largest capacity you are comfortable with.


Dont eat or chew on your cards,,they are not very nutritious!

I'm late to this discussion. Memory cards are like a refrigerator. They need to be completely cleaned out every so often. This is done by formatting the card. Do this in the camera because a fast card formatted wrong in a computer becomes a slow card. The best thing to do is schedule your formats so you don't forget. The biggest danger with CF cards is a bent pin in the camera. The space in the camera usually is a little wider than the card to accommodate a Micro Drive. This allows for twisting the card and hitting a pin. Most cameras (except some "pro" units) have gone to SD cards. There are no pin issues. I would stay away from cheap cards. There are some brands such as PNY and Transcend that are very prone to failure. The cheaper you buy, the more chance for disaster. If a card eats your images, don't try to shoot anymore. Try an image recovery right away. Some of the manufacturers have their own software which works best with that brands card. (Lexar and Sandisk) You may also want to check with your camera manufacturer as to what brands they have tested and recommend. Lexar and Sandisk are usually the first two listed. In regard to SD cards, and memory cards in general, they are not dead if washed or swam with. They usually can be dried out and read. I don't recommend this however. SD cards are almost indestructible. However, I have destroyed one carrying it loose in my pocket. The little plastic dividers break and then the card gets confused. If anyone has questions, I would be happy to try and answer. My experience is based on running a camera store for 15 years.