Formatting vs. Deleting and Defragging SxS Cards

[Adam Reuter]

I apologize if this has already been addressed but I did not see any thread titles specific to this.

Does Sony recommend formatting or doing a delete all for SxS cards? The Vortex Media DVD says that Delete All is the better way to go (because formatting erased stored picture profiles on the cards but not on the camera) but I've noticed that deleting clips leads to slower thumbnail loading.

Which leads me to this question. Does formatting the card "defrag it" in that the camera must now start afresh and go over the data from the "beginning" of the card or must a Windows or Mac defrag process become necessary?

[Robert Young]

This may be wrong, but I thought I had read or heard that you shouldn't defrag the SxS card with the ordinary Win or Mac utilities, that reformatting in the camera is preferred, and should wipe the card similar to any other reformat operation. You do have to remember to save your settings to a new .SUF file after reformat.

[Adam Reuter]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

This may be wrong, but I thought I had read or heard that you shouldn't defrag the SxS card with the ordinary Win or Mac utilities, that reformatting in the camera is preferred, and should wipe the card similar to any other reformat operation. You do have to remember to save your settings to a new .SUF file after reformat.

Thanks for the reply Robert. I finally bought some new external hard drives so I could offload my footage. I promptly formatted the card and the thumbnail loading has sped up significantly. It wasn't agnozingly slow before but it was noticeable and it was because I'd delete clips and record new ones then delete those...rinse and repeat.

Formatting in-camera (I'd never do it on a computer, I know better) took more than a few seconds so maybe there is also a defrag-like process that the camera does. Thanks for the advice on defragging...I'll definitely not be doing it now.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

from what I understand, fragmentation doesnt really occur in flash media. Access time for flash media isnt affected by the physical location of the data on the medium. Hard drives benefit a lot from having all parts of the same file (and sometimes folders) located in sequence so it can read the entire file without having to move the head or wait for another platter rotation to finish reading/writing the file. flash doesnt need to do this.

it is possible, however, that when you delete a clip it may not delete all traces of information about the clip. I'm not completely familiar with the structure of SxS, but maybe it leaves some references to the clip you deleted so when viewing thumbnails it has to parse extra information while figuring out what clips are still on the card so that it can show them. formatting, however, definitely removes all traces of old clips.

[Giroud Francois]

you should never defrag a memory based disk or card.
addressing is done cell by cell , there is no difference where the cell is (they are all the same, no one is slower than another).
if you do that , you are massively writing on the memory and that is very bad for its life.
memory disk based system use a "leveling" process that make sure that no cell is used more frequently than another to ensure the writing cycle are evenly distributed (there is a limited number of write allowed per cell).
defragging a card is just putting wear and tear on it, it does not help in any way

[Dave Morrison]

On a related note, can anybody explain to me what's happening with I occasionally insert one of my cards and get a "Restoring Media" or similar message? I can't remember exactly what I was doing prior to getting this message.