So, with all the talk of SD cards around here, I figured I’d share my somewhat unconventional new approach to SD card management. Given the extremely low price of SD cards and their relatively large storage capacity (esp. considering their small physical size), I have now only been using cards once. When I run out of space, I just open up a new card, test it and go. The used cards get transferred to the computer, and then they get piled in a neat little stack. Seriously. Extra backup.
We’re talking about a cost of about $0.04 per image (M9 DNG) on an SDHC card. Average color negative film cost about $0.20 per image (about $0.40 with developing) and that was single use too.
I haven’t gotten there with the S2’s CF cards yet due to the price of 90MB/s cards, but I’m sure it will happen eventually.
David Farkas
Red Dot Forum
Leica Store MiamiSpoken like a true retailer 😮 Don’t you just miss the days of film and processing revenue?
Not a bad analogy by the way. Instead I take the cost of film and processing and make up for the depreciation on my gear.
Atanabe;474 wrote: Spoken like a true retailer 😮 Don’t you just miss the days of film and processing revenue?
Memory card sales make up such a small percentage of our sales, are so inexpensive and have such slim margins (if any at all) that my retailer hat is taken off for this one. I have been taking the single-use SD card approach personally and figured I’d share.
Trust me, this isn’t an attempt to boost memory card sales. 🙂
Not a bad analogy by the way. Instead I take the cost of film and processing and make up for the depreciation on my gear.
What depreciation? You shoot with Leica, no? 😉
David Farkas
Red Dot Forum
Leica Store MiamiDavid Farkas;472 wrote:
When I run out of space, I just open up a new card, test it and go. The used cards get transferred to the computer, and then they get piled in a neat little stack. Seriously. Extra backup.What is the problem you’re addressing? This seems like a strategy to _maximize_ the likelihood of finding an SD card that fails. Thoroughly test the cards you’ll use as spares and in-camera and replace them far less often.
Hard disks are so cheap now that I think that’s the way to go for strong backups, but not NTFS or HFS (neither Windows nor Mac have modern filesystems). Keep an eye on http://tenscomplement.com/ for their ZFS software package for the Mac – that and external Thunderbolt or SATA disks will be by far the most reliable way to go once the tenscomplement.com product is released (but don’t use USB disks).
The best reason for long-term SD storage I can think of comes from the extremely low weight-to-GB and size-to-GB ratios. A bank safety-deposit box is going to be able to back up all of a studio’s library easily in SD form for off-storage to protect against fire and theft disasters.
Hi first here so be kind.
I’m curious heard David discuss one use SD cards on the recent video. While I tired to consider the costs benefits or not I thought I’d look up the forum discussion. Now it seems this is quite an old thread so I’m wondering if things have changed. Today I use 64Gb cards in my M10D which gives me upwards of 19500 DNG files and at around £8-9 for a Standisk version that’s very cheap per image. An external SSD is around £145 for aa reasonable 1Tb.
So I’m thinking SSD main storage With the original SD card as back up and maybe cloud for the selects.
This should be plenty of room for a while. (Unless they bring out an M 11D!
If an SD card fails it usually happens when you first use it.Is there a real down side to this?
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