Compact Flash Card Reliability

[Scubatooth]

ReyerR

Intresting i didnt know about that, that something i need to dig up and read on, as that would mess up alot of fellow C series camera owners who use those formats dont harm there cards.

would you care to elaborate on this header thing for those that dont know(and i will go read my owners manuel)

tooth

 

[Dee]

ReyeR...I didn't know that either. I always clear and/or format my cards in the camera and this is just another reason to continue doing so.

Thanks

 

[hyaku]

I have had problems with two Smart Media cards. I try to treat these thin wafers as delicately as possible but....

Twice its the same problem take all the pics, you can look at them in the camera but you cant download them to the comp.

I erased the cards to make a fresh start but the problem re-occured. I seem to have no problems with the ones with a bigger memory

 

[Scubatooth]

hyaku once bubbled...
I have had problems with two Smart Media cards. I try to treat these thin wafers as delicately as possible but....

Twice its the same problem take all the pics, you can look at them in the camera but you cant download them to the comp.

I erased the cards to make a fresh start but the problem re-occured. I seem to have no problems with the ones with a bigger memory

whose brand of card reader are you using???

also have you tried to use the supplies cable with your camera to getthe images off ?

tooth

 

[ReyeR]

See these links:

http://www.geocities.com/roberthaus/pan/index.html and

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/smcrestore/

It's a recovery method for the panorama header for Smartmedia cards. You can use this method to 'fool' the camera for the pano mode with non-Olympus branded Smartmedia cards too.

I'd imagine the same would happen to the xD cards. I haven't looked for a recovery method for xD cards yet.

 

[chinacat46]

Scubatooth,

Thnx for the info but your comparison of an XD card to a RAID array is incorrect. I do RAID for a living. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The key word here is Redundant. When a disk goes down in a RAID device you don't loose data. The data can be recovered from the other disk drives by striping the data and parity across the drives. It would be nice to have redundant memory so if the XD cards are like a RAID array then you wouldn't loose data if one chip went down.

- Chuck

Memory Card info
*XD: is the newest format and is a joint venture of Fuji and Olympus as a replacement for the smartmedia cards, it is a smaller form factor(about the size of your thumb nail) there is one problem because memory is stacked and the arrangement of the memory leaves it vunerable to loss and corruption without notice, the memory set up is similar to that of a computer raid harddrive array, and that if one chip fails the whole card is gone. also currently is limited to 512mb but plans in future to go over 2gb. price is roughly the same at this point as the sony memory sticks.


if your looking for a comparison of media types, speeds, and costs look at this article http://www.dpreview.com/articles/mediacompare/ it is mainly on compact flash cards but give you a general idea


Note: sorry if this sounds scatter brained but this was typed in short intervals over 5 hours

 

[chippy]

Scubatooth,
The key word here is Redundant. When a disk goes down in a RAID device you don't loose data. The data can be recovered from the other disk drives by striping the data and parity across the drives.
- Chuck

Almost, I run a striped array with two drives - if one goes, the everything goes with it!

Only a mirrored array or striped and mirrored will provide backup.

 

[chinacat46]

Almost, I run a striped array with two drives - if one goes, the everything goes with it!

Only a mirrored array or striped and mirrored will provide backup.

Well a two disk striped array isn't redundant. You need at least 3 disks. Then you could write data to two of them and parity to the other. Or striped data and parity across all 3. If you just have two drives and want redundancy then you need to mirror. If you have more then two drives you don't need to mirror for redundancy. It depends on your RAID level. RAID 3 and 5 are the most common and there are variations on those.

 

[Scubatooth]

chinacat

for the most part the average person will never use a raid 1 or higher array, unless they are the data storage/warehousing business(which would put it in the Sun spark department which normally run 1+0 arrays, with built in intelligence to protect the data from failure of drives, and the cabinet will call to support before it fails, so a tech can replace the disk or depending the cabinet may have built in hardware to generate the necessary data checksum to protect againist a failure before the drive is replaced depends on the set up), for which the average person doesnt, a high end gamer or graphic artist may use a raid 0 or 1 set up but thats it.

but in the case of XD memory cards i am correct the cards are set up similar to a stripe raid 0 array, and this was confirmed to me by fuji usa and olympus usa by there engineering department, as this compromise was made inorder to get the most memory out of the smallest package possible and thats what they did. so if a chip goes bad onthe card its toast, maybe i didnt state it as to the correct version of raid but it was close enough for explination for every one to understand

FWIW

Tooth

 

[chinacat46]

Well now that you state that it's level 0 I agree that loosing one chip would make the whole thing useless. That's why most companies who care about there data use Level 3 or 5. In that case if one drive goes down you don't lose your data. They also usually have a hot spare and the failed drive is reconstructed to the spare hopefully before another drive goes down which would be bad. Some even will do an offsite mirror of their Level 3 or 5 array thus being even more redundant. But the average Joe using level 0 doesn't get much except possibly a little speed. To me level 0 shouldn't even be consider RAID cause it isn't redundant. The main reason companies use RAID is to protect their data. In all RAID levels other then 0 if a disk goes down you don't loose your data. If two disks go down then it's bad but there are RAID levels that protect against that too although they cost in money and speed.