[gatorguy]

Format is not the same as delete.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report

Very informative.

[beachgardener]

yes a format, in camera, for me too

[biz-engineer]

I am not sure if your information is incorrect, or just old. Modern SD cards are generally accepted to be reliable for 100,000 R/W cycles. If you fill your card with photos, and erase (delete or format) that card EVERY DAY, your card can be expected to last 273 years. Said cards also have circuitry built in so they do NOT writer repeatedly to the same section. Wear and tear from repeated R/W cycles is more or less evenly distributed across the card.

That said, doo-doo happens, cards fail, carry spares, copy often, backup every time you move cards onto your permanent storage.

---------- Post added 01-02-20 at 15:19 ----------
There is a lot of information on the web that SD cards contain 'wear-leveling' circuitry, and have for about a decade. Are you stating that this technology is only activated when FORMATTING; that DELETING does not do the same thing? FWIW, I have run SD card through the washing machine, and the dryer. The come out smelling all flowery, and continue to work just fine. I have also had cards just plain stop working. At current prices, I can't imagine it matters, unless you have photos of a UFO, BigFoot, and Nessy, all on the same card.

My comment and yours aren't incompatible, if you read carrefully.

---------- Post added 03-01-20 at 06:58 ----------

My same SD cards are steaming on along after over 5yrs of constant use and formatting several times per week during most weeks. Filling the cards and then downloading is a total PITA for me. So if you feel you need to jump through extra hoops during your file saving process have at it.

Yes, our comments still hold true.

---------- Post added 03-01-20 at 07:02 ----------

Inefficient file storage...


Steve

I don't know what you mean. If any interest, what is do is to let my sd card fill even if I already copied images on my notebook (leaving files on sd card is additional redundancy). When the card is 80% full or when I know I'll need lots of capacity I format the card.

[MossyRocks]

Are you stating that this technology is only activated when FORMATTING; that DELETING does not do the same thing

While they do have wear leveling like SSDs do it isn't as competent or capable. There are 2 types of wear leveling one which actively manages sectors and moves things around as needed on demand and that is used in SSDs and in industrial flash cards. Doing this requires additional power and is slower and makes the assumption that the device will be powered on for an extended period. The other is more passive and is really only triggered during formats and with writes to unused sectors but for writes it is basically a if failed mark the sector as bad and try a new one. This is faster and requires less power but doesn't do as good of a job. The proper wear leveling happens during a format when logical and physical sectors are remapped. Also since the file allocation table remains on the same sectors any write to it overwrites the same sectors until it is formatted and things can be remapped. I suspect that what causes failures for a lot of cards that aren't formatted frequently is that the sectors for the FAT have been overwritten too many times so are just worn out yet the other sectors have plenty of life left. This actually happens to a lot of people running those small system on a chip (SOC) computers like a raspberry Pi that are trying to use a SD card as a hard drive.

Modern SD cards are generally accepted to be reliable for 100,000 R/W cycles.

This assumes that full wear leveling has taken place. Individual cells and physical sectors have a substantially lower number of cycles usually only a few thousand and as feature sizes have shrunk and the bits per cell have gone up this number has gone down but processes have improved so which it has gone down it hasn't gone down anywhere near as fast as capacity has increased. Add in under provisioning, spare capacity that is only visible to the controller, and we have a case where the reliablity has actually gone up. SSD actually have more spare capacity and the better ones more than others. This is why the cheaper SSDs from a manufacturer will have a slightly higher capacity but a shorter warranty. For example Samsung sells both 500GB and 512GB SSDs, they both use the exact same flash chips and the same number of them but the more expensive 500GB one has 12GB extra spare capacity that is accessible only by the controller. So if one wants to save some money on SSDs you can buy the bigger cheaper drive and actually under provision it some more your self by only have a file system that uses 500GB of the 512GB provided by the drive. You will however not gain the extra warranty offered by the more expensive drive but will experience a similar lifetime to the more expensive one.

[BarryE]

Thanks for the input. I was not worried, only curious. I duplicate my SD cards in-camera, so I'm not concerned about failure of a card. It seems that even if there are marginally differences between deleting and formatting at a FAT level, the differences for the photographer are negligible. Formatting has always made sense to me, preferring to 'start afresh' each shoot.

I am wary about SD card access in card readers, having had problems in the past just reading from them. I'll never write to an SD card in a card reader. Therefore, a format after a SD card reader access makes me feel better too. Another reason to stay formatting ...

[ashurbanipal]

I always Copy images from SD Card to Computer Hard Drive using Lightroom. At this point I still have the original on card and the copy on hard Drive. After viewing in Lightroom to confirm a succesfull transfer. I then Format the card in camera. I have never had an SD card fail apart from mechanical damage and at the current prices, I am not too concerned over exceeding the read/write limits on the card or anything other form of wear and tear.

This is what I do as well.

[MossyRocks]

A low level format writes all the timing, cylinder, track and sector boundary markers on the disk and is not necessary for solid state storage.

I haven't had a machine that was even capable of a low level format in ages and even then I only used that feature a couple of times with a drive that was a few hundred MB that I had screwed up royally doing something else back in the mid 90s.