I'm going to whine....

This is a replica of a comment on a post referring to this - http://improvephotography.com/676/9-things-photographers-need-to-know-about-memory-cards/

Now, I'm going to sound pretty opinionated in this, but to be honest, I think the article needs a bit of further explanation.

Memory cards use FAT32 as a filesystem. It isn't very robust. Deleting or formatting is - medium term - not going to make any difference. You can also argue that formatting is bad for the card as is required the FAT - File Allocation Table - to be rewritten. Since cells can only be written a certain amount of times, then if the FAT is in the same place every time, you're going to corrupt your cards sooner by formatting them every time.
Formatting does not reorganise the folder structure, it rewrites the table (or its contents, I'm not 100% sure and I'm not going looking) which tells the camera where the files should be put and re-creates the default folders.
- There is absolutely no difference between a 16 and an 8GB card IF the number of memory chips on the card is the same. You don't know that and will probably never find out. Which would explain why larger cards *may* use more power.
- The biggest single increaser of speed is your card reader. My Extreme IV from Sandisk hits 35MB/s, which is pretty much maxing out USB2. The inbuilt one in this Dell E6400 hits 10MB/s. For 16GB, that's a hell of a difference.
- Deletion: FAT is a very basic filesystem and so what happens with deletion is that the pointer *to* the file gets deleted and the file itself is still there. However, the parts of the filesystem it used are marked as "available", so it's extremely important to not write any more information to the card. If you need a free utility to retrieve from a falsely formatted or deleted card, try Photorec.
If that doesn't scare you about how much information is left after formatting, then you are unscareable.
- Card writing rates: RAW on my K5 is 30MB / pic. I have Ultra II 32GBs and Extreme 16GBs, rated at 30MB/s.
The buffer on the K5 is 512MB or so. The first 15 pics fill up the buffer and then I can only shoot as fast as the card will allow. On the Ultra IIs, this is significantly slower than with the Extremes.
Data Rate at FullHD at 30fps is 80Mb, so that's 10MB/sec. For that, Ultra IIs are perfectly OK.
Only limitation is the file system, which limits at 4GB max file size... or 63 bits +1. Around 10 minutes at Full HD.

The 400x thing for speed is a leftover from the days when CD ROM readers were measured this way and it refers to 150kBps as being "standard", so 400x means theoretical 60MB/s. Practically, I don't see that you're going to get that unless the card reader supports UDMA and is on a faster bus than USB, so you might get a small advantage in the camera (see above) but it's unlikely on the computer.

Oh, and specially optimized cards for Nikon? Hmm. Let me think about that - got some independent numbers?

As far as reliability is concerned, yes, a smaller card is *statistically* going to have fewer problems than a big one, if every /x/th cell has a problem. No guarantees, though....

- Bret