Paul Schmidt
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 p.51 #4 · 'Un-Official' pre-PMA Rumor Thread | |
Greg Pavlov wrote:
Having mucked about storage media for 30+ years (14" disk drives in the
old days :-), I've been wondering whether I'm better off with a high-capacity
card or several small ones: I'd be paranoid about the large one failing and
taking everything I did with it, as opposed to spreading the risk a bit and
saving at least some of what I'd done if one of 2-3 smaller cards fail. Or
is that only a remote possibility ?
14", oh you mean the hard platter packs? Yeah, I never worked with those, but I remember 8" floppies, and cassette tapes, when the rule was to save your work on at least two seperate cassettes, because your chance of a read failure was about 1 in 4, and the chances of two cassettes failing at the same time, was a lot less likely.
I wonder about a solid state card failing though, the most likely reason for a card to fail, is that it was damaged, and the most likely time for it to be damaged is while being removed/inserted into the camera. So dumping the images on a regular basis, and reformatting the card once you have confirmed they are on the computer, should reduce the likely hood of failure to a fairly low number. At least until the FLASH memory starts to wear out (typically 300,000 cycles, by which time, you have probably worn out most DSLRs anyway). One thing I would do though, is keep a spare card, and if a card gives an error, swap cards immediately, your chances of later recovery are much better if you don't monkey with it in the field.
Having looked at various cards, and being involved with computers almost as long as you have, they all need to be carefully handled, especially when being inserted and removed, but if you drop a CF card your also more likely to find it again, even in the bush on a moonless night, when your flashlight is dying.
Okay, so maybe a wedding photographer, would take more then 1000 shots, but then most cameras have a Large-Fine mode as well, which at least doubles capacity, and is good enough for the picture of Uncle Ted, with the lampshade on his head
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