Camera Labs

Well...
My SD card just "died" about two hours ago. I put it into my card reader (just as usual) and my computer found it but couldn't read the data, then it told me it couldn't find the card anymore. About one hour ago I had no hope to restore the data I just wanted to save on my hard disk but after several attempts I somehow managed to save the data via "PC Inspector File Recovery". Took quite some time but the most important things are saved now.
After that I put the SD card back into the camera and formatted it and now it seems to work again.
Now my question is: How save is it using this card? I don't really trust it after having had this problem now but maybe the problem wasn't the card but some kind of software issue? At least it didn't die completely like my (very) old card did.
What would you do? Use it on or throw it away? Is it alive and healthy again after "some kind of illness" or is it a zombie that just seems to be "alive"?

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Canon EOS 500D + Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Canon EF 24-105mm 4L IS USM + EF 100-400mm 4.5-5.6L IS USM + EF 100mm 2.8L Macro IS USM + Sigma 12-24mm 4.5-5.6 EX DG HSM + Canon Speedlite 580 EX II + Nissin Speedlite Di 466

It sounds like you pulled the card out of your camera or computer before it had completely unmounted. As far as how safe it is to use: I used to have a 320GB external hard drive. At some point, I turned it off or unplugged it without properly unmounting it, and my computer had exactly the problem you describe. (It could tell the drive was plugged in, but could not access any of the data on it.) I didn't know that there's actually software that can fix this, so I reformatted the drive. I then ripped it out of the external hard drive case, and it's now my primary internal hard drive (the one with the operating system on it). It's been going strong for about two years now (after three years as an external drive). So assuming this was the problem, your card is perfectly safe.

That said, it's somewhat cheaper to replace an SD card than a hard drive.

Although I've never used it on flash memory and that application is not mentioned on its site you could experiment a bit with Bart's Stuff Test. Just don't let it run excessively long because of the limited number of write cycles of flash memory.

Found this on a forum: "you can kill a ssd with about 36 hours of 4k random writes. at least that's what Intel says....so be careful in your testing."

I also found this utility: http://www.flashmemorytoolkit.com/ It has some kind of error scan function.

But if there's any doubt about its reliability you'd best buy a new card and keep this one in reserve or for some other non-critical use.

Ben
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When in doubt..... Press the shutter.

At the moment I guess not the gardener but the card reader was the killer (I did another test). Not quite nice as now I have to connect the camera to the computer (until I have a new card reader that takes SDHC) in order to get the pictures and that's quite some more work but well... could have been worse.

But thank you I was quite stressed that day.

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Canon EOS 500D + Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Canon EF 24-105mm 4L IS USM + EF 100-400mm 4.5-5.6L IS USM + EF 100mm 2.8L Macro IS USM + Sigma 12-24mm 4.5-5.6 EX DG HSM + Canon Speedlite 580 EX II + Nissin Speedlite Di 466