ka7197;436 wrote: You’re pretending the only possible reason for losing digital images was card failure. Maybe I’m just too clumsy but in my experience, other kinds of reasons are much more prevalent in real life.
In six years of shooting digitally, it happened three times that I lost images on a memory card before I could download them to some other media:
- Hardware error on a brand-new 1 GB flash card (as described above).
- Pulling a card from the camera while the red access light was still blinking, as I was in a hurry when the (small) card was full right in the middle of the unfolding action.
- Confusing two cards, being in a hurry again, and inadvertently formatting and re-using the wrong card.
Failures #2 and #3 were my own faults, not the card’s—and that’s my point: this kind of glitches will occur when you have to change cards in the middle of the job too often. Both failures would not have occurred if my cards had been bigger. I am more afraid of me to make a mistake than of the card to fail. After initial break-in, flash cards are pretty reliable in normal use. Heck, even my 6 GB Microdrive from Hitachi, being more sensitive to shock and vibration than any flash card, has never missed a byte. So—the less cards I have to juggle while shooting, the safer I am from losing images.
Doing something in a specific order – all of the time helps. When running low on disk space, replace before it fills completely. I have a different colored case for my spent cards. Not only that but it has a leash, waterproof and floats. Hey, blank cards can be bought new but loaded cards can’t be replaced.
As far as MTBF, the card that failed me last was used about 40 cycles before failure. The one before, about 60 cycles, I have yet to have one fail early in it’s life. The last card failure was due to a sequence of button pushing on my M9 and not from changing the cards, so stuff happens.
As with Las Vegas, I’ll bet on myself any day before betting against the house.