maintaining flash cards

[jens1204@earthlink.net]

Has anybody here found a way or running maitenance software on their flash cards to defragment and all that. If so, could you please let me know how yuo have done it. I have found that flash cards eventually bite the dust with fatal errors after prolonged use and I am hoping it is due to my not running maintenance on them. I also wondered if formatting versus "erase all" makes any difference in the life of flash cards.

[stduc]

I use XP and Win98 and have found that although you can check /defrag the card as if it were a disk drive in a card reader it doesn't appear that much happens. Therefore I have resorted to doing things the old fashioned way. That is, whenever I think a card has got fragmented I move the entire contents to my hard drive and then either copy or move them back to the now empty card. So far (touch wood) I have had no problems. I regularly use my cards to move computer data around as well as take photographs, sometimes at the same time. I have to say though that I never use any of CANON's software - such as the zoombrowser.

[CyberDyneSystems]

Fragmentation is an ailment that can only occur on a disk drive. It does not occur on a flash card. A Microdrive therefore could concevably become fragmanted but only if you were to contiously leave some images on the card while deteing others.

Since by nature of the use of the cards we tend to "empty" them on a regular basis,. fragmantation ois unlikely to ever occur.

On top of that,. every time you format a drive of any type,. all fragmentation is erased.

I do no think any of the disk utilities truly apply to flash memory.

[Jong]

I agree. The people promoting defrag utilities for flash cards are just trying to make money out of people's ignorance. Arguably they are positively damaging.

Flash cards can be re-written far fewer times than a hard drive. Defrag utilities tend to shuffle data around on the 'disc'. Instead of one read/erase cycle each time you take a photo, one cell may be written to hundreds of times during a defrag. You are significantly reducing the life of your card.

[stduc]

I wasn't aware flash cards had a limited life. I hope it's not too limited because I use my 128MB card every day for many purposes.

They do get fragmented unless you simply copy all data to your computer and then erase them. To prove it, try deleting every other image on a full card and then seeing how long a movie you can make!

At the risk of repeating myself - you don't need a de-fragger if you use a USB or PCMCIA card reader. It is quick enough to periodically move everything off the card and back. But you only need to do this if you use the card like I do.

Can I just say I have had the 128MB card for 9 months. It has been well abused and survived so far.

[dgcohen]

A CF Card uses fat system and as such can get fragmented. However, since it is a solid state device there is no seek time to penalize the user. I'm not sure if movie mode is looking for contiguous sectors. In any event, if you erase completely or format the card the issue is mute. I prefer format for a full card, it's quicker.
Dave Cohen

[marcel wouters]

Some people are reporting long search time (next photo) on big memoru cards (512 meg), this could be due to fragmentation problem.
From the forum it appears that the canon format is somewhat different that a cf reader software format.
So to be safe i format my 512Mb (fromtime to time) card thru the camera menu after download and erase, this take just one second and cost nothing!

[stduc]

Dave Cohen:- Your absolutely right a re-format is the best solution. I feel obliged to point out however that although there is no head seek time on a CF card there is a software overhead as the next available 'sector' is found. The only reason I can think of that movies fail on a fragmented card is that movie mode only looks at largest available space and not total available space, which is a bit silly as the movie is written to the internal buffer at record time and then saved to the card. So how long it takes to write to the CF card is of no consequence.

Marcel:- There is a difference and you should always format the card in the camera. XP and NT would format the card to NTFS anyway by default and so the camera would report a card error.