SD card failure

I know they are very tough but many say you should back them up... I'm going on holiday for 10 days and I will probably just take two 8gb cards with me and look at the photos at home.

So what is the failure rate, I've 6 cards and none have failed *knocks on table*.
What is your experience?

Since amount of card varies I'll ask for an percentage.

The only failure I have had was not electronic but the write protection switch falling off.

I have only had one card ever fail on me, and it was because of a cheap reader that shorted the card. I was able to recover the photos through a lot of ingenuity, and the card was replaced by the manufacturer since they could not determine if it was the reader at fault or the card.

The Photomonk

I've had temorary stange behaviour, but no permanent failures. I don't know what to answer in the poll.

Same here. I fear dropping or losing individual cards more than electronic failure, and of course while the card remains inside the camera you're unlikely to lose it (we all hope!)

I've never had an SD (or CF for that matter) card failure *touches wood*

Thank you all, one of my survived a the washing machine so it's hard to break them most failures would be electronic.

The score is very good, you can't say the cards are unreliable.

Well 64GB cards are coming this summer, I can get 750 photos (PEF K10D) on 8GB so around 6000 would fit on the bigger card, I think storage wouldn't be a problem
link

Do you think Pentax would/can make an update for those cards like they did for the *ist so that they work with SDHC?

I've only every had one SD/SDHC card 'fail' and that was the hard case of the card cracking.

I've had failure to read a card too - sorted with card recovery software. Reformated card and continued to use it.

I'm sure there will be some for whom 64GB SDXC will be 'essential' - perhaps for a lot of video. Personnaly I would rather have multiple 4GB SDHC cards each of which is filled by 100 to 130 DNG+JPG - that way I minimise the effect of failure of a particular card, and if away from my home PC can easily copy one card to one DVD with my notebook PC before reusing the card.

That somehow makes sense but also not... if you need to buy more cards then it get only more likely that one will fail because you've more.
Of course all failing at the same time is very unlikely.

I'm not so good in probability calculation, hopefully someone can enlighten us

If you have four cards instead of one, each card will only get 25% of the use. If one card fails then only 25% of the images are compromised, and if it's a long time since they were new that might be a timely warning to replace them all.

Ditto.

My husband had one SD card fail though I suspect that was a problem more with his Laptop than the card - I was able to extract [ using my card reader and my MacBook ] about 75% of the JPEGS on his card - the others we did lose . So I'm not 100% sure this was the card.

Yes, I was about to post that, although the SD card hardware itself is reliable (until it starts to reach the write cycle limit), the filesystem and the devices that write to them can fail. So it's still a good idea to back them up. I don't leave camera images on a card too long; once uploaded to my PC they live there and are backed up with the rest of my files.

Never had an SD card fail personally, and I use them as general purpose storage in my Nokia Internet tablet.

I have lost images from an old 32MB smartmedia card. That was due to filesystem corruption incurred by attempting to write to the card from an (Olympus) camera with a nearly-dead battery. The card itself was fine once reformatted.

1 Ultra II failed recently. That was dying for a while.

That's the first in 10.

I would take a laptop and secure / backup, but that's me.

Bret

I clicked on 0% but actually that isn't completely true.

I had one card fail in the camera and two others which just mechanically fell apart. These were all el-cheapo cards.
I quickly went to Sandisk Extreme-III cards and never had a single problem again.

Last year I bought an imagetank and I love the thing. It gives me a lot of extra peace in my mind. I backed up the cards every couple of days and when a card was full I did another backup of it. After that I stored the full card in a safe place away from the camerabag. The imagetank is allso not in the same place as the camerabag.