[photolady95]

I voted 0, zero, none at all. But I use quality brands and am careful how I treat these cards. Granted some cheap cards will fail no matter how you treat or handle them, and that's why I don't buy them.

[skid2964]

I had one issue one time, with a Sandisk Extreme III. I shot my photos and plugged the card in my reader..... nothing! And I had just reviewd them on the camera, put it back in the camera.. nothing!

I recovered all the photos using a program used to recover deleted data from hard drives. Apparently the card lost it's FAT or something.

I formatted and all was well, have used the card dozens of times since with no issues...

[Canada_Rockies]

I think, the poll should differentiate between high quality cards (like Sandisk Ultras and Extremes) on the one hand and cheap discount brands on the other:

I hade "0%" failure on Sandisk Ultras and Extremes, but "50%" failure on cheap discount cards. That is a couple of years agao and I gave up completely on cheap cards.

Ben

I'm one that has had no failures, but my cards are two 4 Gb SanDisk Extreme III and two 8 Gb Lexar Ultra cards, not counting the 2 Gb Kingston in the photo display electronic picture frame thingy. They all rate pretty well (not the Kingston, but it came with the camera), and I am leery of the "great price for this" syndrome. I've been bitten too often.

I always format in camera after I am absolutely sure that I have the images copied successfully onto two hard drives. I never, ever, delete an image from the card. I only format them. By formatting, and never deleting, you remove all chance of an image file being in two or more pieces on the card (fragmented). There are a number of extremely good reasons why defragmentation software exists. It is to put the files contiguous for much more secure reading. If you do not delete an image, all your images will be contiguous, or as close as the system can get, anyway.

[mattdm]

I always format in camera after I am absolutely sure that I have the images copied successfully onto two hard drives. I never, ever, delete an image from the card. I only format them. By formatting, and never deleting, you remove all chance of an image file being in two or more pieces on the card (fragmented). There are a number of extremely good reasons why defragmentation software exists. It is to put the files contiguous for much more secure reading. If you do not delete an image, all your images will be contiguous, or as close as the system can get, anyway.

I don't think this particular reason is likely to hold true in the case of flash memory. It's random-access, so there's no particular advantage in files being contiguous. Meanwhile, the wear-leveling firmware on the card itself will try to spread out writes across previously-unused blocks of flash at a lower level than the filesystem, so reformatting or not makes little difference.

I think the reasons to avoid deleting in the field are, in increasing order of importance:

1. avoiding extremely unlikely FAT filesystem bugs in the camera firmware
2. reducing the number of unnecessary write cycles overall
3. eliminating another point of possible user error (delete wrong file, overwrite before you think to use recovery software)

[Canada_Rockies]

I don't think this particular reason is likely to hold true in the case of flash memory. It's random-access, so there's no particular advantage in files being contiguous. Meanwhile, the wear-leveling firmware on the card itself will try to spread out writes across previously-unused blocks of flash at a lower level than the filesystem, so reformatting or not makes little difference.

I think the reasons to avoid deleting in the field are, in increasing order of importance:

1. avoiding extremely unlikely FAT filesystem bugs in the camera firmware
2. reducing the number of unnecessary write cycles overall
3. eliminating another point of possible user error (delete wrong file, overwrite before you think to use recovery software)

Thanks for the input, Matt. I'll study up on flash memory - but I doubt very much that I will delete images, ever. I format in camera. No harm, possible good.

[Wheatfield]

Last night I put a Patriot 8gb card into my reader, which just sat there blinking it's little blue light.
After a few moments of waiting for an Explorer window to open I decided to pull the card and reseat it.
It had gotten quite hot sitting in the reader, so I suppose it's a failed card.
It's now in the garbage.
I've never had a failure with a Sandisk though.

[tenpointnine]

I've had to check the EXIF data, to see how long I've been shooting digital, and apparently I started in 2001, where did the last decade(almost) go?

I've always bought Sandisk cards. Usually the highest spec available at the time. No card failures.

If only hard drives were so reliable.

[bdery]

I collaborate in a beginner's photo forum, and there is a 15 pages long thread about xD (Olympus" memory cards failing. It CAN happen, and we often have questions about SD cards becoming corrupted too, but it does not happen often.

Best practices do involve having many cards (if you physically break it, or if it gets stolen, you have backup) and formatting it in camera often.

[John K]

I've only used approx 6 cards and had one failed card, losing approx 50 shots out of several thousand - still really annoying when it happened though as I lost some photos of a trip to China that I'm unlikely to repeat. It was 5 years back and I think it was a low end sandisk SD card. A local Fuji lab tried to rescue the images but couldn't get anything back. No problems since then but I usually go for high quality cards & I'm paranoid about backing up images.