MicroSD in adapter for EXTREME reliability?

[Paul Anderegg]

I keep having inevitable card failures, typically from my SD cards physically desandwiching, and peeling at the contact end. Prior to this, the fins typically break and bend, and even killed the SD port of one of my Macbooks. I shoot ENG, so cards and being inserted and removed constantly for each story...so I am curious about a solution.

I am very hesitant to spend big money on very fast high capacity cards, simply because I don't want $100 in card to go poof due to physical reliability problems from prolonged use. Would I be better off just using MICRO SD cards in full size SD adapter, that way, the little card lives in it's protective little "dock" of sorts, and cannot be physically compromised? Are there inherent reliability issues with Micro cards, that full size do not have, maybe from heat? They seem to have the same speed, and last time I peeled open a 64GB full size card, the thing was basically a little contacts strip in a big hollow empty shell.

Paul

[Dan Gunn]

The problems you described are the same problems I experienced. When I contacted the manufacturer which I refuse to name (Lexar), They said I was too rough on their cards. Now I am going to open a can of worms.....when I switched to SanDisk my rough handling must have improved. I have had zero failures.

[Paul Anderegg]

Yeah, name them...Lexars are the same cards that keep peeling apart on me, 32GB, 64GB, they have horrible service lives. Sony SDHC 16GB cards typically, in my experience, just arrive brand new from B&H DOA...last order of 4 I got 2 dead cards. I can't ever remember having a SanDisk card fail, either electronically, or structurally...have been having good luck with the red/black UHS Sony 64Gb cards as well, although the paper labels tend to wear/feather a bit causing slot insert/eject issues....a minor niggle.

Paul

[Cary Knoop]

Lexar is no more.

[Derek Heeps]

While I haven't used SD cards for video ( at work we shoot XDCAM on the optical discs , or SxS cards ) and my own kit I am still shooting HDV tape , or onto Firestore ; but since I do a lot of still photography most everything is on SD cards these days ( cameras using CF cards pretty much retired now ) .

I probably do more photography than video and my SD cards are in and out of bodies AT LEAST once a day and often more . While my DSLR does offer the comfort of twin card slots , I tend to shoot RAW to card 1 and JPEG to card 2 ; this both provides a backup in the event of card failure , but also saves processing time if a client needs a JPEG emailed quickly after a job .

The cards I have seen more failures with ( both cards just going bad , and physically falling apart ) have been the ProSpec brand sold by Calumet - I must say that Calumet have always been very , very good about replacing these without any quibble , and I've never lost any images thanks to having a second card in the camera , or because ( with earlier cameras and only a single card slot ) I've realised at the time and been able to swap cards and reshoot . These cards were bought by my employer , so I never had any say in the purchase . To quantify this , I am talking about somewhere between five and ten card failures over the 10+ years I've been shooting digital ; and it's fair to say that the cards which failed were fairly well used by the time any mishaps occurred - there were problems with both CF and SD cards .

After a while I started buying my own cards , especially since the cost is so low nowadays , and I have settled on Sandisk Extreme or Ultra cards , and in my last three years of shooting with them , not one single failure . I now have a wallet of about two dozen each of 16Gb and 32Gb cards , all numbered and used in rotation as matched pairs of a 32Gb card for shooting RAW in slot 1 and a 16Gb card for JPEGS in slot 2 ; I slot in a pair of cards for each new job and format just before using them ; that way images remain on the cards until I've gone round the full circle of cards and guards against anything going missing , at least for a week or two , although RAWS are normally transferred to my Laptop asap after each job .

I do have a handful of micro SD cards , which are 32 and 64Gb Sandisk Ultra cards , used either in my GoPro or in my dash cam - no problems to date with any of these either .

One little anecdote , a friend is a cameraman with one of the major news agencies and sometimes has to cover stories in war zones and other dubious places ; he will at times shoot onto micro SD cards then conceal them in the unlikeliest places due to their tiny size , whilst leaving the empty adaptors either in the camera or where they are readily found . On more than one occasion he has been relieved of these empty adaptors by unknowing security guards , but got away with the micro SD cards !

[Dan Gunn]

Originally Posted by Cary Knoop

Lexar is no more.

Oh no....boohoo. Those smucks owe me for a bunch of cards.

[Dan Gunn]

BTW, be careful where you buy cards. I thought I could spot a counterfeit. Nope! I got my surprise on Amazon.
Now I only use one source.....B&H.

[Noa Put]

I have had one of my kingston cards crack open revealing the inside of the sd cards, my sandisc extreme pro cards though have been great until now (*knocks on wood*) and that is the only brand I will continue to use. also only order from a large local video/photo reseller, never through ebay or amazon.

[Steven Digges]

If it can possibly break or fail Paul will figure out how to do it ;-)

+1 on SanDisk. The only problem I have ever had with them is my rough handling broke the little plastic lock off of one. I filled in the gap with epoxy and put the card in my video surveillance DVR to keep it out of cameras. I don't use the locks anymore. I too, count on a rotation system. I also stick to 32 gig cards most of the time. I have always said that giant data devices scare me because of the potential for catastrophic loss.

Kind Regards,

Steve

[Jim Andrada]

Hmmm. When I started out in IT a "Giant Data Device" had a few MB capacity and was about the size of two refrigerators. Physically giant sized, storage wise, not so much! 32GB is pretty "Giant Size" by those standards. Only memory card I had fail was a San Disk 16 GB CF card in my SD702 and fortunately I was able to recover the audio.

[Paul Anderegg]

I had one of the first 1GB HDD CF cards...yes, HDD, as in spinning little platters! This was in 1999 for my Canon D30 DSLR.

Paul

[Jim Andrada]

I forgot to mention - it was 1959. Things have changed a bit in IT nearly 60 years.

[Steven Digges]

Yep Paul, I still have two of them. At the time it was like, OMG they hit the 1 Gig mark in CF! Of course 1 Gig in true CF media was down the road. These are spinning HD that go into a CF 2 slot.

Jim, I'll bet you had to take a sweater to work in summertime because they were keeping all those machines cooled down???

Kind Regards,

Steve

[Jim Andrada]

I was working in IBM's storage business when "we" came up with the microdrives although I had nothing particular to do with that particular development. Nice idea, but never really swept the market. As I remember, at the time I was working in Tokyo as the IBM Product Manager for storage marketing in Asia/Pacific, mainly selling refrigerator sized storage units. I think I must have a couple of the microdrives around here somewhere.

Sometime in the early 80's we had set out to find major customers that had a TB or more of storage. There were a few - counting the entire corporation. I think GM had a TB if you included the GN Research group, In total. World wide.