Corrupted CF or SD cards

I have been using Compact Flash for years, and have never had a card get corrupted on me. Does this actually only happen rarely and people just make it seem like it happens occasionally?

It is reasonably rare, but it does happen. People get hit by drunk drivers every day. Something that happens 'every day' isn't exactly 'rare', yet when you consider everyone who doesn't get hit, then the odds of it actually happening to a given person are really exceptionally low.

There are also 'user error' issues as well. I have one card that had a few weird writes to it when I was swapping stuff around for downloads. Somehow the index data of one card was overwritten with other data, making it look like there had been a problem with the card that made all my photos disappear. At first it appeared to have been a card failure, but as far as I can tell it was merely a software glitch that caused data to be overwritten where it shouldn't have been, and I was able to recover everything except the original file names. Wouldn't surprise me if relatively simple 'glitches' such as this actually make up a rather large portion of the 'failures' out there.

Very rarely. I had a Sandisk Extreme IV corrupted on me about 5 years ago. The card went bad after 2 months of usage. I have a second copy bought at the same time and it is still working.

catclaw wrote in post #16829715
I have been using Compact Flash for years, and have never had a card get corrupted on me. Does this actually only happen rarely and people just make it seem like it happens occasionally?

In any product you tend to hear about the issues. I'm not likely to start a thread stating "I have a Sandisk CF card and it is working well, anyone with similar experience." So "yes" probably in the big picture rare but on a forum you likely see a high than normal percentage of complaints.

John from PA wrote in post #16829781
In any product you tend to hear about the issues. I'm not likely to start a thread stating "I have a Sandisk CF card and it is working well, anyone with similar experience." So "yes" probably in the big picture rare but on a forum you likely see a high than normal percentage of complaints.

Yeah. I was expecting people to say "I have never had any corruption issues."

John from PA wrote in post #16829781
In any product you tend to hear about the issues. I'm not likely to start a thread stating "I have a Sandisk CF card and it is working well, anyone with similar experience." So "yes" probably in the big picture rare but on a forum you likely see a high than normal percentage of complaints.

"Here is the 6 o'clock news from the BBC
Nothing has happened today of any interest to anyone.
You can hear more about these non-events in our 10 o'clock bulletin.
Goodbye"

Just not going to happen, is it? Similarly, as John says, no-one is going to initiate a discussion about something working properly. Hence, we do tend to get a very skewed perspective of how prevalent these faults really are. Additionally, like motoring accidents, I'm sure that a good proportion are caused by the 'nut holding the steering wheel' or 'the tree just ran out in front of me, I couldn't miss it ** '. It only takes a moment's impatience in opening the card door (for example) to screw up writing the data and then we have a "faulty card". We don't actually remember opening the access door a little too quickly as that's momentary, what we remember is that the card is corrupted as that lasts a lot longer.

Yes, I've had a card go bad on me (actually an SD, but let's not quibble). Was the card faulty or was it the idiot holding the camera? Dunno. Can't prove it one way or the other so, rather than admit that Mr Perfect could possibly have made even the slightest error, I'll blame the card. First I convince myself that it's not my fault, then I'll justify it to anyone who'll listen. American rubbish, cheap Taiwanese junk, rip-off Chinese garbage? It's either that or admit that I made a mistake and nobody wants to do that, do they.

Things do fail, of course they do, but I'm sure that many of the failures we hear about are 'pilot error' rather than true 100% card failures.

**This sentence was widely publicised in the UK as coming from an actual insurance claim!

Also keep in mind that CF is now a premium and niche products, which sell for very high $/GB. For this kind of price premium, manufacture can afford to do a lot of screening, burn in, .... other testing before the product actaully hit the shelf. The memory in CF card is quite reliable, much more so than SDs and USBs.

eelnoraa wrote in post #16833418
Also keep in mind that CF is now a premium and niche products, which sell for very high $/GB. For this kind of price premium, manufacture can afford to do a lot of screening, burn in, .... other testing before the product actaully hit the shelf. The memory in CF card is quite reliable, much more so than SDs and USBs.

Yeah. I've read that CF tends to be faster than SD in field tests as well, even if it's rated the same as a CF card.

catclaw wrote in post #16833423
Yeah. I've read that CF tends to be faster than SD in field tests as well, even if it's rated the same as a CF card.

There are two parts to getting the speed in any memory card. The host and the medium.

Take SanDisk ExtremePro 90/95 for example, in order to reach that speed, the host needs to drive the card at UHS-I mode, which have channcel bandwidth of 104MB/s. If the host doens't drive the card in this mode, say it is driving the SD card in the next slower mode, SDR50, which has channcel bandwidth of 50MB/s, no matter how fast the card is, it will be capped at 50MB/s.

For CF card, there UDMA7 which is 166MB/s, the next slower mode UDMA6 is 133MB/s .... so on.

Most camera today with CF card support is highend camera, so having a fast UDMA support is not uncommon. Devices that use SD, including camera or other mobile device, due to various cost and power comsumption consideration, not all will support UHS-1 mode.

eelnoraa wrote in post #16833418
Also keep in mind that CF is now a premium and niche products, which sell for very high $/GB. For this kind of price premium, manufacture can afford to do a lot of screening, burn in, .... other testing before the product actaully hit the shelf. The memory in CF card is quite reliable, much more so than SDs and USBs.

I really doubt that much of what you say is backed by much fact.

If one looks at the failures reported on this forum (and perhaps by the lensrental people) then bent pins is the dominant mode of failure and this falls into the realm of "pilot error" more than a manuafacturing defect, although cheap cards do have dimensional issues.

Failure Only once- when the disk was taken from the camera during read/write. It Did not like that.
Got twin drive body now- but one of the drives is SD which is dead horse slow and reduces FPS once buffer is full and takes many seconds to clear.
But at least everything is backed up as I go.

Gregg.Siam wrote in post #16835165
I have had it happen more times than I would like and it's the reason I just used to transfer files using the camera and not waste time pulling cards.

But, I'm fairly confident the problem is in the fairly old Kingston card reader, not the SanDisk Extreme card I'm using. I have since went to a Lexar usb 3.0 drive and had zero issues. A great card reader by the way.

Moral of the story, it is not always the SD/CF card, but it can be the reader or your OS is broken in such a way that it causes data corruption (OS based corruption is even less likely, but can happen).

This is the one I use.

You just reminded me about a single corrupted card I had now. Yes, I did have a corrupted SD card about 7 years ago, and I will also confirm that it was the cheap Chinese card reader. I threw that away and did the exact same thing you did (kind of funny actually) - I started reading only from the camera. And then I also did what you did a year ago and I bought the Lexar Professional card reader that looks like the same one you put a picture of. How funny.

banzee7 wrote in post #16842699
As you are stating that It has happened to you more that it should be, there can be various reasons for it.
1. Not using good quality memory cards: failures in memory card can ruin your entire expedition which makes all your photos inaccessible in moments.
2. Improper handling of card: When you do not handle your card well, it tends to get corrupted. Rough handling is one of the main reason.
3. Taking it in and out of camera very often: frequent actions like these make your card more prone to facing situation of corruption.
4. Error while copying images: you might get unlucky, when you try to copy your images to computer through data cable or with card reader.

The best solution is to avoid such incidents is to handle your card and data transfer carefully. You can control a few things but a few are totally on your bad luck.

But if you still face such issues, refer to any of the available photo recover software like recuva or stellar phoenix photo recovery which is capable of extracting deleted and in accessible files from memory cards as well as from other storage devices.

P.S. Its a bit late to reply on this thread as its a bit old and you might have found a solution to your problem till now.
But for people people who face this problem in coming future, they can refer to this.

#3 is untrue. Photojournalists and sports photographers take their memory cards out of the camera several times a day, and the cards last years. Usually upgraded for more space and continued to be used as backups.

Everything else is correct.

There never really was a problem. I've just had SD and CF cards for a long time and got lots of use out of them, doing photojournalism to weddings, and only had one card corrupt on me (and it was the readers fault.) I was just curious how many other people really did have a problem with corrupted cards.

It has happened to me several times, with CF cards. The first time, I was thinking it just was an incident. The second time, I was thinking it was the card. I don't know if it was the same card, but I was thinking it was. That card was skipped away. The next time, and the time after that, with different card, I was thinking it was the card reader, but other card readers do not made any difference. And there was no corrupted files from the other camera, even if I use the same card reader, so my conclusion was that the camera was the source. Actually a pretty expencive fault. later I have experienced that these cards also make corupted files on the other camera, and other cards do working fine on the first camera. From what I understand now, I have at least 4 corrupted cards, all of them are Sandisk Ultra 8GB..

There's a lot of links in the chain - from the manufacturing to the transport, how it is treated in the store and then what happens to the card while you use it. There are user issues, and then problems with the actual machines you use to read the cards can cause problems with the cards and data on them as well. There are just too many points of failure and much of it is just random chance. Some people will be luckier than others. You sound like you've been lucky so far. But there's no reason to assume that it will last so may as well get prepared to take at least some reasonable precautions like never putting an entire wedding on a single card.