Compact Flash Ageing

Hi

Do compact flash cards age?

The Sandisk 1gb card I use in my D30 seems to be getting slower (although it might be the camera, or it might be imagination now I have got used to my 20D).

I tend to wipe it down by formating it in the camera.

Do they get slower with age? Any better way to format them?

All the best

Keith

CF cards do age but it's almost not noticible. If your CF card seems slower try to format it as FAT32 in a computer with a good recent cardreader.
After the format watch at the capacity it shows. A 1 GB CF card sould show about 980 MB of formatted capacity.
Then put the CF card back in your camera and format it again before you use it.
One of the things that can happens is that some memorycells in your CF card are wear out.
But like I said it's happening very rarely. Good luck.

Hi

Cheers. Silly question but how do you format it in a PC? Just format it as though it is a normal disk?

Main time it is noticeable is when trying to look at shots. Seems to take an age to go write to the CF and clear the buffer to display them. Card has had a fair amount of use but nowhere near the amount that is talked about to kill a card.

All the best

Keith

Put your card in a Cardreader and then in your computer. In explorer you should see the CF card as a normal diskdrive. Rightclick on it and select properties to look at the card and/or select format from the same scrolldown menu. Format as a FAT32 and check the properties again to see the formatted capacity. Good luck.

Hi

It formatted as 976mb.

Had a play with the D30. From taking a sequence of shots and filling the buffer (11 shots) it took 45 seconds to write everything to the card and then display the first picture again. This was 16.3mb. That means roughly 300kb/s transfer rate to the card which is a bit slow but not too far out.

The full format possibly seems to have improved performance over using the in camera format.

All the best

Keith