I’ve never tossed a card but for whatever reason but purchased larger cards to mirror the size of my primary cfexpress card. Been shooting professionally for a decade. I format all my cards before each shoot. Never had a failure. But this is a good solid way to ensure your medium is in good shape. Thanks for the tip!
I'm sorry, scanning for bad sectors is not the correct way to gauge the health of your drive. If there are bad sectors, it means that the storage has already failed, not that it will fail in the future.
Adding onto this, the test you run simply tests the response time of each sector. The "bad" card you tested may be perfectly healthy. It's just so slow compared to modern NAND flash that it's coming up as problematic.
@@me_rap27 Short answer: write cycles and age of card are the biggest "predictors" of drive health. There are no ways to predict when a drive will fail since "average" life only provides you one statistic. The best thing you could do is always have two cards in your camera for any professional work. Dual card slots are a relatively common feature now. Getting into the weeds: Determining SD card health is not an easy topic. You could look at total data amount written, and calculate write cycles from SMART data, or you could do a sector test like in the video. If doing a sector test, I think it would be more telling if one or two sectors are worse than the rest of the card. That would indicate an actual problem with the card. (notice how in the video, during the test of the 2GB SD card @4:20, the test finds no bad sectors are found.)
@@Rocky_KO Thanks for that. I did come across some info that Disk Utility can do a few things as well. I'll give that a try as I'm picky about which programs I allow such permissions to.
@@tofulosophy Disk Utility is quick and limited, that's Apple's ethos for everything and it's what makes MacOS easy to use for many people. However, once you need to dig deeper, many 3rd-party apps are needed.
