You have a card error? What now?

Imagine that you’ve filled your flash cards and brought them home, fired up Aperture and started the import. You come back a few minutes later to check the import — and you see the error message. Read errors on the card.

uh, oh. Now what?

I recently had that happen. To make life even more fun, I recently bought a couple of new cards (Kingston 55x 2Gig) to supplement the SanDisk Ultra II 2Gig cards I already had. One of the Sandisk cards was the one showing the error, and the first thing I did with one of the Kingston cards, of course, was leave it in my pocket so it got washed and dried with the laundry.

Do you assume the card’s bad? Or do you verify it? How?

Here’s what I did. your thoughts are more than welcome.

First thing I did was put the two cards, plus a third card (the new Kingston) in my card reader to see if they’d mount on the computer. They all did. I did this for a few reasons — but the main reason was that if there was something electrically funky about the card that got washed, I wanted it to short out the card reader, not one of the camera bodies. It’s a MUCH cheaper fix to replace a dead card reader, so any card you don’t trust, you should never put in your camera. Paranoia is a good thing sometimes.

Once all three cards passed the sniff test, I pulled them and put them in the camera and formatted them. I always format my cards in the camera I’m using them in, because I believe that minimizes possible compatibility issues. They all passed that test.

Now, one at a time, I put them back in the reader, and grabbed a hunk of files and copied them onto the card, so each would be ~90% or more full. The first card I tried, the sandisk, started failing.

The first reaction, I bet, is to think that the card is bad. But what if it’s the reader? This could be an expensive assumption.

So I took that third card, the one I HAD NOT done dumb things to yet, and put it in the reader, and started copying.

Yup. It failed. So now what?

As it so happens — because James had flogged the Lexar compactflash readers, as long as I was buying the new cards, I picked up readers for myself and Laurie. so I unplugged the old reader, unpacked the Lexar, and hooked it up, and retried the copy to the card.

Of course, all three handled the write fine, as well as erasing the files again. A stong indication that card reader is going bad. Good timing on buying that new one.

I wanted to go further to verify the cards, though.

I took each card and stuck them in the camera, and shot pictures of my office until the card was full. It then got stuffed in the reader, and I let Aperture import all of the images, and then erase and eject the card. I then made sure the images imported looked okay — no corruption or obvious problems. I then erased them all out of Aperture and deleted them from disk again.

About 40 minutes later, and 650 shots later, all three cards tested out, a full format-shoot-import-erase-format cycle. I formatted each card again, put the two Kingston cards in the Canon bodies, and put the SanDisk cards in the wallet.

I can now trust those cards in regular use. If you ask me, peace of mind is worth an hour or so of my time; I don’t want to be reaching for the wallet on a shoot to get a new card, and find myself thinking “is that the card that was throwing errors last week?” I’d rather retire the cards than carry them and not trust them. Any piece of equipment you’re not comfortable with is more of a hazard in the field than a help — so get to know your gear, learn how it works and how you want to use it, and don’t carry it unless you’re comfortable with it and trust it. that way, when shooting, you focus on the shooting, and not on issues like “will this work?”

the end result for me: one retired card reader (inexpensive), and three good cards (not so inexpensive). That’s good.

I think this backs up an important idea: for critical items, have a spare. Card readers are critical now. So are cards. you might not need to carry two readers in your bag in the field, but if you’re travelling? It probably makes sense (both don’t need to be expensive ones, they do need to be reliable).

Ditto cards. I use 2 gig cards these days. In my Canon bodies (D30 and Rebel XT), shooting raw, a 2 gig card holds roughly 200 shots. I feel it’s much better off to carry a pair of 2 gig cards instead of one four gig card. The risk of catastrophic failure of the card is much worse than the risk of losing a critical shot because you have to swap a card once or twice during a shoot. So to me, the only nice thing about the 4 and 8 gig cards is they drive down the price of the 2 gigs (always a good thing).

Every time I leave the house now, I carry five cards: two Kingston 55x 2G cards, one in each body, Two SanDisk Ultra II 2 gig cards, and a SanDisk Ultra II 1 Gig card in the wallet. That gives me close to 1000 shots before I have to get to a reader and import to make space. that may seem like a huge # of shots — but I have taken more than 600 shots in a single day, and I’d rather carry an extra card or three than run out of “film” at a critical time. Cards are much cheaper than missing a lifetime shot.

It also means that card failure doesn’t shut me down. Since I tend to believe failure happens at the most inopportune moment, I try to plan for how to minimize those disasters; it’s my way, if you want to look at it that way, of convincing Murphy to go annoy an easier target.

No film photographer would go out with a single roll of film in their camera — even though cards are much higher capacity, I think the same idea applies, though. To be honest, card failures happen, and if having a spare doesn’t convince you to carry two two’s instead of one four, then consider that carrying two two’s gives you a much better chance at salvaging some of the shoot if you lose a card in the middle. And finally, if a card fails, losing a two is a lot cheaper than losing a four.

All things considered, think about how many shots your camera can fit in a gigabyte of card, and how often you want to change them as you shoot, and buy the right size, but not too large. Don’t go too small, either. I won’t bother carrying less than a 1 gig card these days — 512m would be maybe 50 shots, and that’s just too few for me. I don’t want to be changing cards every ten minutes any more than I want to lose all of my shots on my only card. Cards in the 100-200 shot range seems “right” to me. Figure out what feels right for you, and buy to that size.

For what it’s worth: the Kingston 55x cards are MUCH faster than the Sandisk, both in accepting shots from the camera and in the import/erase process on the Mac. Very nice so far. And I noticed a huge (5x or so) difference in speed between my old reader and the Lexar. Using the Lexar AND the Kingston was faster than using either part with the slower alternative — so all of the pieces in the puzzle matter here. Something to consider as you’re buying these things — spending more on a top-notch reader is worth it in time saved, and faster cards also speed up the import process, and also reduce the number of times you’ll be waiting for the card during burst shots.

All things to consider. Sometimes a small investment ($20 more in a reader, $15 in a card) can significantly improve your workflow and cut the time you sit waiting for things to finish….

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