Is that enough?

The other day, a friend of mine e-mailed me a deal from FutureShop.  FutureShop was selling these new Duracell 16GB SDHC Class 10 cards for $25.  My first thought was, wow, $25 only?  When did Duracell enter the computer storage market?  It certainly is not searchable on Duracell's website, as of this writing.  Anyway, I thought there was no need to purchase more memory cards as I already have a couple of 16GB, one 8GB, one 4GB, and one 2GB.  When I thought I had enough memory, a single trip to Ecuador in December would prove me wrong--stupid me, I brought only two 16GB.

The problem with memory requirements is not so much because of the photos we take.  I could not possibly have taken that many photos to fill up 32GB of storage.  That would require more than 4000 JPEG photos taken at the highest quality on my D7000.  If I had taken photos in RAW NEF format, maybe I'd need 2000 photos to fill up 32GB.  The problem was, I was doing video as well.  High definition video can eat up memory fairly quickly.

My friend was going to pick up one SHDC for himself.  He ended up purchasing four cards, two for him, two for me.  I will now carry around with me four 16GB--64GB of storage.  Is that enough?

Formatting your SDHC card

Well well well ... this is interesting. As part of the firmware upgrade, I reformatted the HP 8GB SDHC card using Windows XP before putting the firmware images on. After the second image has been loaded into the camera, I left the SDHC card as it was, formatted with Windows XP.

I was doing some test shooting today when I noticed some difference. It would take a new picture a few seconds to be saved to the card. It also takes a few seconds to delete a picture. Did I notice this behaviour before with this HP SDHC? No, I do not remember seeing this behaviour ever before. Maybe the firmware did something funny to the file I/O subsystem of the camera. I then decided to reformat the SDHC using the built-in camera formatting feature. As it turned out, it was not the SDHC. It has something to do with the way the card was formatted. After the card has been reformatted with the camera's formatting software, saving and delete pictures from the card was quick. Either way, the filesystem format is FAT32. I don't have one of the cool Norton Utilities to inspect the SDHC card but there is some difference between the way the D80 formats a card and the way Windows XP does it. In Windows XP, I performed a "Quick Format" but that is probably what the D80 does anyways as it takes no time to format the SDHC card.

Strange.

Merry Xmas!

SDHC speed

Here is a non-scientific test of my SD/SDHC cards. The test was, to write 70MB of a Java folder from the C: drive to the root folder of a memory card connected to a USB2.0 port, disconnect the memory card, reconnect the card, then transfer the Java folder from the memory card back to a temporary folder on the C: drive.

Patriot 4GB SDHC (Class 6)

Writing to the card: 90 seconds
Reading from the card: 30 seconds

HP 8GB SDHC (Class 4)

Writing to the card: 80 seconds
Reading from the card: 28 seconds

Kingston 2GB SD

Writing to the card: 105 seconds
Reading from the card: 26 seconds

Foto Source 1GB SD

Writing to the card: 75 seconds
Reading from the card: 27 seconds


The fastest overall of the bunch is this Foto Source 1GB SD card bundled with the Nikon D80 when I purchased it. It was not really part of the package but the store just threw it in. It's a no name brand. The new 8GB SDHC comes next, followed by my first SDHC card, the 4GB SDHC, and then the Kingston 2GB SD. The 8GB SDHC is a Class 4 SDHC (this Class specifies a minimum speed of 4x, i.e. 4 x 150 kBps or 600 kBps). It performs better than expected at about 1.1 MBps. The Class 6 Patriot 4GB SDHC card is expected to write at a minimum 900kBps. Well, it writes at over 1.2 MBps.

I thought the Kingston 2GB SD was really fast, from what I could see when viewing pictures off the card but when sustained writes are performed, it does not measure up very well. The specs of it are: up to 5 MBps reads and 1.5 MBps writes. It does not appear to perform anywhere close to specs on sustained I/O. Sustained reads and writes took more than twice longer than expected. Very disappointing.

Regardless of the speed, there is absolutely no problems with using any of these SD or SDHC cards in a D80 for continuous shooting. Remember that the D80 has a internal write buffer.

How much memory is enough?

I just received an 8GB SDHC card. I was not sure if it would work with the D80. Well, it does! In addition to the current set of cards I have, I now have 17GB of SD/SDHC cards for my camera. I think I will start to record in both high-resolution JPEG and RAW formats. I have spent up a full 8GB over three cards on one vacation trip before so having an additional 8GB will make me even more generous in my shooting. Having said that, I do recognize the need to be more selective and take time to compose my pictures. So, I have 17GB of memory. My friends will not like this.

My SDHC 4GB Card

Back in February or January, I dissected the SHDC after it fails to write data. I opened the card to see the inside then glued it back together with superglue. It seems the card will need another dissection. Something is loose inside. What could possibly be loose though? There are a couple of chips on a logic board.

Well, this makes no sense at all. Windows could not see the SDHC card. I thought the SDHC was really broken now. I opened it up and something fell out. It was a piece of the SDHC plastic case. It could not have cause a short or something that could have prevented the SDHC from functioning. I re-assembed the SDHC card but could still feel something was loose. Well, the loose item is the whole logic board itself, but the interface pins look fine. Anyways, everything is superglued together again. The SDHC is working again now.

SD internals, part 3

Guess what -- I just found the darn little devil! It fell out into a zipper compartment of my camera bag where I stored the SDHC card two Sundays ago. Oh well, so I have a permanent write-protect tab.

For anyone interested in seeing what the plastic tab looks like, here is a couple of macro photos of it below. I used my 50mm with an extension tube for the shots. Lens was set at f/8. Speedlight was on manual at 1/128 the maximum power. The shutter speed was at 1/25 secs.

As you can see, the L shape is a hook that fits into a groove along the write-protect slot of the SDHC card. Tiny bugger.

SD internals, part 2

The cracked SDHC card has been fixed. I happened to have some super glue around so the SDHC has been put back together. The cracks are glued tight shut.

Now, I did lose the write-protect sliding tab. After opening the card, it is clear that the tab has no electrical properties, i.e. it has no electrical contacts nor does it toggle an electrical or electronic switch inside the card. The write-protect mechanism seems to work like the 3.5" floppy disk write-protection mode. With the floppy, you slide the tab over the hole and the floppy disk drive knows not to write to the floppy disk.

My first band-aid was to tape over the empty slot. That worked but not very well as the tape increased the width and thickness of the card and changed the cross sectional shape of the card a bit. It was a little hard removing the card from the camera.

I removed the tape and substituted it with a piece of paper. However, you do not want to just stick a piece of a paper in the empty slot, as the paper can easily get dislodged from the card and be left behind as you pull the card out of the camera or a card reader. Since I had super glue, I filled the hole with the glue and moistened the paper in it then leave everything to dry.

I now have a really permanent write-protect tab. :)

The 4GB SDHC is back in operation.

SD internals

There was not much I could do with the malfunctioning SDHC card and my curiosity took over the better of me. I pried open the card along the crack line and pulled out its gut. Here it is on the right.

Underneath the Patriot SDHC card shell is a couple of Toshiba chips made in Taiwan.

Ok now, I gotta find something to repair that lock/unlock tab that seemed to have disappeared -- the reason the card is currently write protected.