At 07:14 PM 6/13/2009, Moose wrote:
>Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>...
>> 5) format *in camera* to clear the directory (while verifying that it's all
>> writeable)
>> and refresh file folders the camera depends on
>
>Here, I don't see the necessity. But then I only ever delete the last
>shot taken, which doesn't fragment anything, or Delete All when starting
>to reuse a card.
Do you delete all from the computer or the camera? For best analness, formatting
is better. If deleted from the computer each file header gets re-written to
erase,
while in camera format just writes once to the root fat directory. If the camera
has a delete all, that is probably as good as a format.
An in camera format does not do any checking on the card integrity. If it did,
it
would take a long time to format. Most flash systems use ECC and detect bad
blocks on the fly. When they start to fail and get close to the ECC threshold,
they just get marked as bad. And a lot of this might even depend on the camera
firmware. I'm debugging a FAT Flash file system right now for an embedded
Arm processor that has a flash memory controller. So the choice of how to
handle bad blocks is not a standard.
But for most photography work, unless you really take a lot of shots, the
shutter
wear is probably more to be worried about.
Flash cards are so cheap now, relative to the cost of any backup system, that
I just shoot and keep everything on the cards. Anything that has a disk drive
involved
is much more likely to fail. And like Moose, I only delete the last shot taken.
The
Fat file system becomes very inefficient if it becomes fragmented. But I suppose
this is probably buried in the noise compared to most things that go wrong with
cameras. One of the worst for me is the stupid Canon camera does not have
a lock button on the mode dial, so I have to check it every time I pull it out
of
the bag. Many a lost shot because of that on missing feature.
WayneS
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|