should your primary CF card size match your actual usage?

recently I purchased a 1gb CF card for making RAW photos which are

12mb each, so about 84 to a card. however, in a typical day I might

shoot and 5-15 images which I always upload that night or by next

morning. but now I'm thinking that I will quickly wear down a portion

of this card's memory whilst the bulk of it gets unused (or does

memory space get randomly cycled in a CF card?).

 

so my main question is this: would it be better to purchase a

good/fast 256gb card to match my daily photo regimen and carry the

1gig card as backup and for when I shoot extensively all-day or on an

extended trip?

No. It will not "wear out" part of the card.

well a smaller card might be marginally faster. Your CF card is memory not hard drive space and it is allocated through electronics not a physical head writing the information so there should not be wear issues.

It is extremely unlikely that you will run into this problem before the card becomes too small for you to practically use as anything besides jewelry, or perhaps bathroom tile.

 

However, yes, CF cards (and all flash ram products) do wear out over time. This is typically only a problem when you're writing to them constantly (one notable example is if you have a linux-based pda and you use a flash card for your swap or tmp location - not a good idea).

 

See this whitepaper from Sandisk for more details:

 

http://www.sandisk.com/pdf/oem/WPaperWearLevelv1.0.pdf

To answer your question I need to know how you backup your photos.

 

Ex. if you back up to CD/r or CD/rw then 512 would be much better and a full card can be burnt right to the CD.

 

However like others said here you will not wear down a portion of your card, at least I have never seen that.

 

PS. be proud of your photos and use your real name

like I say I upload to my HD first then back up the raw and tif files I keep to CDs. the CF raw files get expunged almost daily. from the responses maybe this is one more advantage of a CF card over a microdrive (not wearing down the same sectors)? thanks - sw

controllers in CompactFlash cards automagically rotate sector usage; you will not "wear out" a portion of it prematurely.

There is an area of applied mathematics known as queueing theory which answers these types of questions with exquisite precision. But common sense dictates that

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1) you buy a card no bigger than the most number of pictures you'd like to take without the nuisance of having to change cards,

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2) you buy a card big enough to hold as many pictures as you will take before you can get to your computer, portable harddisk, or the next CF card

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3) Of a speed that keeps your camera's buffer flushed under all the usual fast shooting situations you expect to encounter

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and

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4) consistent with your budget.

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At the prices of CF cards these days, your last para. makes a lot of sense. Do check out www.dealram.com before you buy.<br><p>

An example may be found at:<br><p><a href=http://dealram.com/prices/19/1GB.htm>http://dealram.com/prices/19/1GB.html</a>

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And no, you won't get uneven wear, for the reason stated above.