C300: Just had my second CFAST 2.0 failure in 4 months, looking for advice

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Lkorver

Well-known member
My nearly brand new, maybe 4 uses prior, San Disk 128gb card failed the other day. Had a 2 year old card fail a few months ago with the same camera ,so I threw out all my cards and brought all new. This particular new card, I took it straight from the camera to the card reader, popped it in the reader, and noticed there were two index files in the folder. i ejected it, put it back in the camera to see what was going on, and the, got the "no clips" pop up from the camera in Media manage mode. Put it back in the laptop and it had the "CLIPS" folder but inside was a single random .CPF or .XML file, no .MXF to be found.

The first instance we were using a DIT, so it was his card reader and his laptop. This time it was my laptop and my reader. So the only constant variable is my camera and the fact they were both SanDisk 128s, although slightly different markings from Sandisk on the front indicating old vs new cards.

My question is, what are some reasons these cards can fail from a user error perspective, and, is there any value in having the camera sent back to Canon for inspection?
 
Thanks Fahnon, the reader I use is the Lexar CR2 via thunderbolt 2. Not sure what the DIT was using when the other card was corrupted, but maybe you are onto something. I'll be ordering a SanDisk Thunerbolt 3 reader asap.
 
Did you physically "throw out" your old cards or metaphorically throw them out? I haven't had a Cfast card failure yet, but I have been dual recording (Transcend and ProGrade combo) and triple recording (SD proxy) to hedge against card failure.
 
klk said:
Did you physically "throw out" your old cards or metaphorically throw them out? I haven't had a Cfast card failure yet, but I have been dual recording (Transcend and ProGrade combo) and triple recording (SD proxy) to hedge against card failure.
Click to expand...

No, didn't literally throw them out, but I guess using them in the 2nd slot is a good idea. Was going to do dual anyways, so that would save some money for sure!
 
Is there any reason for me to send my camera into Canon for testing?

Is there any reason for me to send my camera into Canon for testing?

Is there any reason for me to send my camera into Canon for testing?
I'm going out of town for 2 weeks so I wouldn't miss the camera, just the cost of them checking out the card slot.
 
Man, that's a bummer. Based on what you have said, it sounds as if the variable is the Lexar readers, I had a discussion with an engineer at EgoDisk to talk about why they vehemently discourage using any Lexar CFast reader. The engineer told me that through testing and numerous customer complaints,
they came to the conclusion that using any Lexar CFast reader puts your data at risk as it tends to have a risk of corrupting the file headers, which means that the data you shot was probably still on the card, but if your device cannot cleanly access the file header information, the data looks as if it isn't there.
At the time of this conversation a year ago, I had just bought the C200 and some EgoDisk CFast 2.0 256GB cards and I had the same Lexar reader you have. I immediately returned the reader and instead bought the Sandisk USB 3.0 reader and have not looked back.

I shoot exclusively with the cheap EgoDisk 2.0 cards, have been shooting a relatively high volume documentary since then with the Sandisk reader and the EgoDisk cheapo cards without a single error, or hiccup. We recently consolidated all of our smaller drives we have
shot to a group of larger 10TB drives for our editor. We have shot a total of 80TB of footage using the EgoDisk cards and it's all there, it all reads, plays and looks fine. My advice would be to dump any and all Lexar readers asap and see what that does for your issue.
Of course, my experience is anectdotal but I have been pleasantly surprised by how well the EgoDisk cards and the C200 have performed and my $39.00 cheapo Sandisk reader has been along for the whole journey and has performed flawlessly.

FWIW, I have used these same cards for the past year also on rental and borrowed C300 MKIIs with the same results, no issues.
 
I, too, have dumped my Lexar CFast readers in favor of other brands. I'm thinking my next "luxury" purchase might be the Sonnet dual-slot Thunderbolt 3 reader.
 
So I just heard back from the data recovery place (300dollardatarecovery.com) and they claim they were able to recover 100% of the files. Not sure I understand 100% their description of the issue, and not sure what the cause is or how to avoid it in the future. Does this point to an issue with the card or the card reader or the camera???

"The problem(s) with your device include (at least):

Partition corruption. The "partition" contains the folder and file structure on your hard drive. Whenever "partition corruption" is present, even if 100% of your data was recovered, it means some or all of the folder structure and filenames may be missing or corrupt. "
 
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I’m not a data or computing expert but this sounds like it is related to what the EgoDisk engineer mentioned. I would suspect this is a reader or card issue, doubt its the camera
 
I wonder if, on a good reader, something like CardRecovery which is $56 would be able to pull the files off.
I've only used the PC version.
And not to recover files from a C200....yet, but to recover the files from another camera.
I personally don't use a card reader.
I'm a PC guy and I use a CFast to sATA converter card and just skip the whole reader thing.
I have a sATA/sATA power dongle on my PC off the motherboard to the outside world and plug the converter card in while the computer is powered off and just power it on.
 
Stills2HDConvert said:
I wonder if, on a good reader, something like CardRecovery which is $56 would be able to pull the files off.
I've only used the PC version.
And not to recover files from a C200....yet, but to recover the files from another camera.
I personally don't use a card reader.
I'm a PC guy and I use a CFast to sATA converter card and just skip the whole reader thing.
I have a sATA/sATA power dongle on my PC off the motherboard to the outside world and plug the converter card in while the computer is powered off and just power it on.
Click to expand...

That sounds... like a pain in the ass.

I mean, whatever works for you... but I, personally, would never want to have to power down my computer to swap cards. It's not rare that I come back from a shoot with 4-8 CFast cards that need dumping. If I had to power my computer off every time I needed to switch, I'd be dumping cards all day.

Much easier to just get a quality card reader.
 
Lkorver said:
So I just heard back from the data recovery place (300dollardatarecovery.com) and they claim they were able to recover 100% of the files. Not sure I understand 100% their description of the issue, and not sure what the cause is or how to avoid it in the future. Does this point to an issue with the card or the card reader or the camera???

"The problem(s) with your device include (at least):

Partition corruption. The "partition" contains the folder and file structure on your hard drive. Whenever "partition corruption" is present, even if 100% of your data was recovered, it means some or all of the folder structure and filenames may be missing or corrupt. "
Click to expand...

I'm doing a bit of data recovery myself on a drive this week and I believe what this means is the header of the partition was corrupt or reformatted. So the information is still there it's just that when it mounts, the computer has no "map" to get to the information. Software like Disk Drill can relink the files but in most cases, the files are disparate and no longer retain metadata information. My gut here tells me the issue is the card reader because...

...just adding to the chorus, ditch any and all Lexar CFast readers. We had them with several cameras at our rental house and although we never experienced any data loss, I did have trouble getting cards to mount occasionally. We only use the Sandisk or Codex / ARRI readers now although I am tempted to try out the ProGrade reader as I hear good things.
 
I have nothing but Lexar readers, and one sandisk card reader. I’ve been shooting with the same group of cards for about 2 1/2 years with my C300 Mk2 and the only problem I have had was one of those buffer overflow issues with the camera which stopped recording at that time. I’ve not had card failures, no card corruption, nada. I use shotput pro exclusively for offloads. Maybe I’m an outlier, but no card corruption issues here.
I ‘think’ but can’t prove that the fact that cards frequently are not deep formatted can be an issue, which might be posed by the way the camera formats cards. On the Mk2 the sd card has an option for quick format or complete format, and i’m not sure why the CF cards don’t have that option as well.
 
jbregar said:
That sounds... like a pain in the ass.

I mean, whatever works for you... but I, personally, would never want to have to power down my computer to swap cards. It's not rare that I come back from a shoot with 4-8 CFast cards that need dumping. If I had to power my computer off every time I needed to switch, I'd be dumping cards all day.

Much easier to just get a quality card reader.
Click to expand...

On my computer sATA is much much faster than a USB 3 card reader.

It's worth the 30 seconds to do a reboot.

Maybe your computer takes longer to boot.

Or you don't mind the slower speeds.

On my computer Thunderbolt 3 really isn't that fast compared to sATA either.
 
In case anyone has similar issues, I called SanDisk and they are going to replace the card under their lifetime limited warranty.
 
Stills2HDConvert said:
On my computer sATA is much much faster than a USB 3 card reader.

It's worth the 30 seconds to do a reboot.

Maybe your computer takes longer to boot.

Or you don't mind the slower speeds.

On my computer Thunderbolt 3 really isn't that fast compared to sATA either.
Click to expand...

Then there's something wrong with your computer.

On my computers (iMac Pro and 2018 13" MacBook Pro) USB3 and Thunderbolt 3 are both fast enough that the card is the limiting factor. My ProGrade USB 3.1 reader (10Gbps or 1.25GB/s) can easily outrun the ProGrade cards I use in it (550MB/s read max). So, it's not going to matter if I put them on a faster interface... the card is the limiting factor. Also, SATA3 at 6Gbps is slower than both USB 3.1 (10Gbps) and Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps) by quite a lot.
 
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