Sandisk Extreme III's - So long to format

B

bazza

Active member
I find Sandisk Extreme III's cards take my HMC over a minute to format yet Transcends are done in around 15secs. Why should that be I wonder?
 
I second the question, how big are the cards? and also how much footage do you have in the card?

I found out that cards that have more footage and also more clips take longer that cards with less footage and or less clips!

my Extreme III's format faster than my MicroCenter cards then again the Extreme III's are 8GB and the MC are 16GB


try a full card vs one with 1 minute clip.
 
Superfresa66 said:
I found out that cards that have more footage and also more clips take longer that cards with less footage and or less clips!
Click to expand...

Definitely the case, Full 16gb take maybe 30 sec? Blank cards take a split second - which is why I question how much "formatting" is really going on.....
 
All my cards are 16gb. I'd certainly expect the Sandisks to be faster. I'll try the footage test but this happens so often and I'm sure they are filled fairly evenly, usually around 80%.
 
Cranky said:
Quick Format is not format at all, it is just blanking out directory entries.
Click to expand...

Well if you want to zero all the data then do it on the computer, but you still need a quick format on the cam.
I call it format because it's label format on the camera, i know the difference between the two.
Is there an option to do a full/deep/zero-all format?
 
Superfresa66 said:
Well if you want to zero all the data then do it on the computer, but you still need a quick format on the cam.
I call it format because it's label format on the camera, i know the difference between the two.
Is there an option to do a full/deep/zero-all format?
Click to expand...

Super:

To do a full format you need to use the Panasonic software here:

http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/sd_formatter.html

After the full format, perform the quick format of the card in-camera. The camera does not perform a full format as you said.
__________________
 
SSD memory don't work exactly as e.g. hard disk memory when doing formatting/writing. SSD doesn't support overwriting the data as a disk does, you first have to erase the data before writing the new one. SO when the memory is full of data and you want to write over, basically the system first clean the data and then writes the new one.
This is one of the main concern in using the new SSD disks instead of the usual HDD in any PC .... performances are much better until the disk is full and you need to re-write on it :)
 
Just had a chance to format a couple of 16gb cards both with about 14gb recorded. The Sandisk Extreme III card took 85secs to format yet a Transcend was done in around 10secs. I'm still wondering why this should be!
 
I have 9 Verbatim 16GB cards (working flawlessly) and I've found that some format in as few as 5 or 6 seconds and others take 30+ seconds. It's not dependent on how much data is on them either, it's on a card by card basis.
 
Exact said:
I have 9 Verbatim 16GB cards (working flawlessly) and I've found that some format in as few as 5 or 6 seconds and others take 30+ seconds. It's not dependent on how much data is on them either, it's on a card by card basis.
Click to expand...

i think more than data, it might have to do with the amount of files on each card, maybe a card with more clips would take longer to format. Either way i always try to go into a shoot with all my cards ready to go. =)
 
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