Don’t buy the wrong SD card (Memory Card Tutorial)

Tony Northrup tells you everything you need to know about SD cards for your cameras. He tells you what the MB/s really means (hint: it’s often meaningless), the truth about memory card failures, whether expensive brands fail more often than cheap brands, and much more!

[CyberEditing]

Outstanding! I film with up to 30 vid cams simultaneously (non stop all day) & the micro SD cards do fail. Sticking with one personally tested brand, with identical specs for all the cards, yields consistent professional results.

[PeterBrockie]

It's also a generally good idea not to totally fill SD cards (or SSDs for that matter) due to the wear-leveling where it spreads the writes over the card as much as possible. SD cards in general have relatively low endurance since it is just a single flash IC vs an SSD which uses several and generally has more reserved space for endurance. In general the card brands aren't super important. What matters is write speed consistency, which some cheaper cards can't handle.

A great utility is the official SD card formatting utility made by the SD consortium. It's Windows/Mac and properly formats SD card and even secure erases them (choose overwrite format) - plus it's free to download!

A UHS-II card in an older UHS-I camera does have an advantage in offloading images with a UHS-II reader. It won't help the camera, but you can import quicker at least. :D

[kyokuten]

My personal tip on memory cards is to use them, take photos, having empty memory cards for a long time is worse than a failing memory card

[paulinefollett]

I am always learning from your videos Tony. Thanks so much. I am a bird photographer and I like to use the Extreme Sankdisk SD cards, 64GB @ 90MB/s. I find one card lasts the whole day and I don't have trouble with buffering when shooting high speed flight shots. They are often on special too, which means I can buy lots of them. I like to limit the size to 64GB just in case one fails, then at least I have the other cards.

[ShaynaPulley]

My understanding is, if you have a single slot camera, it's better to use a collection of smaller cards like rolls of film so that if one gets corrupted, your whole trip isn't gone. If I'm planning to shoot high quality video, I'll keep a high capacity high speed card on hand for that purpose. In a pinch, it can also be my overflow card for when everything else fills up.

[RealRaynedance]

a7III user here. I just recently bought two 64GB UHS-II cards from ProGrade. V90 rated. Replaced the 32GB and 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I cards I was using, which are now spares in my bag. The buffer clears over twice as fast (when shooting to one card), and now I can transfer the files to my computer at about 130 MB/s instead of 88 MB/s. (I'm limited by drive speed at this point, not the card's read speed.) It may have cost me $140 on sale for the two of them and slot 2 may only be UHS-I, but that $140 was worth the speed otherwise and it didn't cost $220 like two equally fast Sony Tough cards would have.

Also there's this website called CameraMemorySpeed that's done some tests on a fair few cameras and SD cards to see how fast they write. That's what helped a bit in my decision to use the SanDisk cards at first.

[JordanCS]

I love the Tough cards, and while they were stiff to go in to slots at the beginning, they seem to go in a lot easier after a few days of use. I do recommend the SF-M tough cards over the SF-G, though...they are still very fast (150MB/s write vs 200 for the G), but are like 1/3 the cost.

[tedjensen]

What we’re once my high end cards are now the cheap ones I stash for spares.

[sturmn]

The V30/V60/V90 ratings aren't just good for video, but also for knowing that your camera will be able to write it's entire buffer at a semi-reasonable speed without dipping below the rating. I think V30 is the minimum you want, with V60 being the sweet spot and V90 being overkill

[nightbeatmedia]

This is right on time, I can attest to this. Once I landed a exceptionally good interview, only to have card fill up and fail. Now I backup and carry extra cards.

[Tinfoilnation]

My only tip: *On Workflow* I got burned once by failing to do this, so... never again. The very first thing I do with an SD card now when returning from shooting is *back it up* . It should be STEP ONE. Don't review your images, don't "move" your images off the card. I have a large network attached storage but if you don't just copy the files to a spot where you won't mess them up - preferably a storage location that is independent (hard drive-wise) from your normal workspace. The backup location you choose should not be the same hard drive as your normal workspace for images - a cheap external USB drive will serve in a pinch if you have nothing else. Then you can move the files off to your normal workspace and begin working with the images.

[rickbear]

Not reformatting (along with never deleting single images) *until the card is full* reduces the write function stress on your memory card. Writing to the card is what causes it to degrade. If you don't reformat until the card no longer has enough space for your next shoot, then the software will write to each-and-every sector, thereby ensuring it is stressed in an even manner. Whereas, if you continually format a card, there is a higher usage of fewer sectors, because the software's pseudo-random choice of which sectors to write to will, invariably, write to certain sectors more often than others; and, with a large GB card, some sectors may never get used. So, Tony's strategy is good for extending the life of his cards.

Formatting your cards does have a positive bonus, in that the formatting software checks for bad sectors, which it marks as unusable, so giving a kind of health check. Keep an eye of the reported available storage of a newly formatted card. It will always be slightly less than the manufacturer's stated storage, even when new, but what you're looking for is a degradation over time. This is a warning indicator that tells you when the card is nearing end of life. A small degradation is ok, but when you see a sharper decrease in available storage, it's time to retire the card to less stressful duties; such as storing your music playlist.

Rick
Professional photographer & technology consultant

[mikehines]

Great information Tony! One little asterisk though. As you mentioned, the Sony is significantly handicapped while writing pictures to the card, but other cameras such as a D750 are not. They allow you to switch to video and record while your pictures are buffering. As a Sony user myself, I hate this and wish they'd take a page out of Nikon's book!

[nvwolfephotography]

one good suggestion i learned is dont buy the giant memory cards so you dont need multiple cards. Say you go on vacation and bring a 256gb card with you, plenty of room for the vacation. However if that card dies you lose EVERYTHING. Better to buy 4 64gb cards and just swap out so that if you do lose a card you dont lose the whole trip, same goes for a lot of shooting scenarios.

[kenfuruta]

One benefit of the "Tough" Sony UHS II cards is the absence of ribs between the contacts. I have had a standard 256GB UHS II card fail after a 2-week trip when one of the ribs became detached. I could not download a single file from the card and would have had no images from this trip. Fortunately, I was shooting simultaneously with two cards, as per your suggestion. Thank you very much for that advise! After that card failure, I now invest in the expensive "Tough" cards.

[skesinis]

Good video about SD cards Tony! Here’s a funny scenario I’ve ran into a couple of years ago: I was using the Canon 80D in combination with 2 SD cards: a 64GB Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS I (Read 95MB/s, Write 90MB/s according to Sandisk) and an 128GB Lexar Pro UHS II (Read 150MB/s according to Lexar). The Canon 80D having a UHS I reader, it was writing at almost half the speed on the Lexar, at about 70~75MB/s and at about 80+ MB/s on the Sandisk. Here’s the funny thing: I was using JPEGmini to compress my JPEGs when I was using RAW+JPEG and when I was doing that directly on the card, the new files would start physically on the same spots as the old uncompressed ones but since they were occupying less space, there would be gaps of free space in the card. For some reason, only the Lexar out of the two cards, and only inside the camera would take about 1 minute to save a new picture while the Sandisk would not slowdown at all! On the computer I didn’t notice any difference in performance and later on, doing the same with a 5D Mark IV I had the same results! Now with the 90D which has a UHS II card reader, I can still see a significant slowdown on the Lexar if I do the same but nothing compared to my experience with the 80D. It seems that file system fragmentation is also handled differently from manufacturer to manufacturer of SD cards. While I was testing this to see if for any reason it was the JPEGs themselves that the camera had any issues with and it was slowing down, I copied them all to the computer, I formatted the card and then copied them back to the card and the camera would not slow down at all this time which also backs up the statement for avoiding file system fragmentation, at least for certain manufacturers/models of SD cards.

[davidtaylar]

Chelsea and Tony are like the memory card fairies. 1) Keep one on you at all times 2) Stash them EVERYWHERE 3) Buy the right one(s)

[marians]

From my experience, if you're not shooting hardcore action or video, go with Cheap.
About the failures: I once had a card feck up during a wedding once, the camera would show "corrupted file" for every picture I took that day. I was terrified. Luckily the files were just fine on the computer but damn that was scary for a second.

[waveland]

For me personally, the Sony Tough Cards provide peace of mind that’s well worth the extra money. We all get in a hurry at times and end up jamming a card in our cameras at the wrong angle. Standard SD cards have that nasty little switch on the side which can dislodge after a lot of handling and potentially drop inside the camera. And there’s a similar problem with the little ribs on the back of the card which run between the contacts. At times those wear and I have had them break off, and the last thing I need is a sliver of plastic getting caught in my camera or card reader when I’m under the gun for a deadline. The Tough Cards eliminate these potential sources of workflow disruption. As for shooting multiple days on a card, that’s I suppose a personal preference thing, and certainly acceptable for non-commercial shooting; but when I absolutely can’t afford to lose work, then I get the shots off the card and onto multiple hard drives as immediately as possible. I don’t trust cards or cameras to be bullet proof enough, nor do I necessarily trust myself to keep the equipment perfectly safe, cameras get wet or dropped (or both) cards get dropped, stepped on, cracked etc.

[tobiasyoder]

Yeah any card can fail. I had a supposedly reliable (and seriously expensive) XQD that crapped out. Was able to get the shots of with some special software