My First Card Failure and Lost Clip Disaster!

I used Lexar 8GB class 4 SDHC (always in PH mode) , no problem ever encountered after 3 months. Support studio1972's proposal.
 
They were both Transcend 16 GB cards

They were both Transcend 16 GB cards

Both the failures reported in this thread were Transcend 16 GB cards. One was new first use (bad idea) and one was used before with no faults.


It sounds like this happened on both cards when they were reaching full capacity. Maybe some type of error occurs when the card nears capacity due to some write/caching strategy the camera uses.

I think using less capacity of the cards would be a safe bet until we can pin down what causes these failures. You also don't hear of many (any) failures with smaller cards like 8GB.

FYI, I have also heard of card failure while trying to import to FCP when the computer freezes.

Just as a precaution, I might not use the Transcend 16GB cards on critical projects until the cause is determined. I use the Transcend 8GB cards and have never had a failure so far.

Edit:

Forgot to mention that EX-1 users are having occasional SDHC card failures too.

One of them said the TestDisk 6.01 recovery tool saved his clips.
 
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I only have transcend cards never had a problem 16 gb and 8gb....
I often recorded to full capacity.

This is terrible though ...
 
Actually Jeff mine wasn't near capacity. I'd used around 5gb then recorded for no more than 10mins so it wasn't even half full. Thinking now the 10.8gb "file" that is apparently there must be the remainder of the memory, not necessarily including my clip, doh. I'm waiting for CardReader to send me a tool to convert the file. Fingers are crossed.
 
I have a 16GB and 8GB, both Transcend brand, never had problem, I usually use a max 80% of its total capacity, which may be the reason for no failure so far!
 
Bazza, was your card never used before the failure?

I'm horrified too. All I use are Transcend 16gb. I have received a card data error, but it did not affect my footage.
 
Me, I only use Panasonic cards. I don't trust any other brands!

I saw many negative reviews (about 10%) on Newegg with most of the other SDHC brands. Like dead on arrival, or failure a few week later.

I just hope that my Pana cards will continue to be ok. The only issue I got with one of my cards was that it stop to record about less than 1 sec after pressing record and the clip was corrupted. It was during a figure skating show and I was directly on the ice! But the following clip was perfect.
 
SPrimeau said:
Me, I only use Panasonic cards. I don't trust any other brands!

I saw many negative reviews (about 10%) on Newegg with most of the other SDHC brands. Like dead on arrival, or failure a few week later.

I just hope that my Pana cards will continue to be ok. The only issue I got with one of my cards was that it stop to record about less than 1 sec after pressing record and the clip was corrupted. It was during a figure skating show and I was directly on the ice! But the following clip was perfect.
Click to expand...

I wish there were some facts and figures on SDHC card specifications and quality. Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba founded the SD Association, maybe their cards are better, but there is no info I can find. I have seen one Panasonic 32 GB card fail (a wedding disaster still being worked on by a data recovery company), so even Panasonic is not immune to problems.

A lot of people are using Transcend, so it makes sense that the most used brand will have the most comments good or bad.

I bet there are either multiple causes or a single deal breaking event that causes SDHC to corrupt (not hardware failure related) that is inherent in the controller or design. Especially since the EX-1 users on SDHC ocassionally have exactly the same problem on a totally different camera.
 
I blame this risk on the using AVCHD as an acquisition format as much as the SD card itself.

P2 closes the file system every few seconds (or even more frequent?) so if there is corruption, it's only corrupting that still open file stream.

I've been so confident with solid state capture from my experience with DSLRs, but I guess that confidence is misplaced because with DSLRs, we're not talking about hours and hours of constant stream of data. There is a much greater chance for data corruption for video applications.
 
I have a few Patriot 16GB Class 6 cards and haven't had any unrecoverable problems, but there have been a handful of times where there was an error that occured on the card which caused the camera to not recognize the clips as actual clips so it would say I had less clips than I really had. Then when I put the card into my computer I would notice they were all there and just fine...I believe my issues were errors that occured in the "playlist" file on the SD card
 
Echoing what Jeff said: a LOT of us here do use the 16GB Transcends (including me) so statistically that has a high likelyhood of being reported bad here.

Also I believe I remember someone on here reporting a Panasonic SDHC card failing on them too.

I like the idea of running a software diagnostic tool on all our cards first. But until we know exactly what the problem is, it's difficult to know exactly what will help.
 
Update

Update

At the moment CardReader has recovered what looks like an 11gb thumbnail jpeg, not video. So some way to go and I've asked them for more advice.

I've looked back over the 11 Transcend cards I have purchased so far from several sources and found they aren't all the same, although they were similar prices so presumably not cheap imitations. The last batch of 3 of which one is faulty are Made in Taiwan, others which have performed OK (so far) are Made in China or have no country identification.

It would be interesting if jmiller14 who had the same problem at the weekend could tell us where his faulty card came from, and if it's Taiwan it's good news.
 
bazza, I shot a wedding where an important scene was not on my card when I loaded it up the next day. I never received a card error during the shoot so I assumed it was an "operator error" (i.e., maybe I failed to actually start the camera for that scene). You note that you found the missing clip #76 - in my case all the clips that were visible on the card were sequentially numbered. With no gap in the numbering, can I correctly assume that my missing scene isn't somewhere on the card? BTW, I use PNY 16GB class 4.

bazza said:
After trying several suggested programmes CardRecovery v4.10.1220 has finally found the missing clip #76 as a 10.8.gb file. Only problem CardRecovery saved it as a temporary file with extension .*cr (where * is a sine wave symbol). I saved a version and changed extension to .MTS but VLC says it doesn't recognise the format. Any ideas how I can get it back to the original format please?
Click to expand...
 
I have 8 Transcend 16 gb class 6 cards and two 8 gb class 6. All say 'Made in China'. Before this weekend, I never had a problem with any of them.

I'm exploring data recovery options - I'll post any updates here. Bazza and others, please do the same. Thanks!
 
HAS0586 I lost just that last clip, card less than half full. As per my first post it happened to be the first 10mins of a wedding service!
 
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