The Sect of Rama

After shooting digital photography almost exclusively for about 5 years, I've finally had my first memory card go bad. The 5th photo written to it is consistently corrupted. Luckily for me, its the high end Lexar Platinum II 2GB CF with a lifetime warranty, so I'll be returning it shortly. (Funny that its the fancy model that has failed, whereas all my Kingston and Sandisk cards continue to chug away.)

The fact that the failure is at the "beginning" of the memory card makes me wonder if the habit of formating the card after each photo session has prematurely worn out the leading memory cells, but Rob Galgraith claims otherwise:

Individual flash memory cells have a limited lifespan. That's the bad news. The good news is that their lifespan is usually measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of erase/write cycles, and that the better controller designs utilize an algorithm that's designed to balance the wear across the entire card's cells.

CompactFlash and SD cards are designed to automatically and transparently map out memory cells that go bad, or in some cases when they reach a predefined limit, i.e. 300,000 erase/write cycles (note that this figure is just an example; manufacturers may use a different figure). Cards should continue to function long after a few cells have expired, since even the busiest photographer's flash memory card won't start turning off a significant number of memory cells until after many years of service.

Despite this, my plan going forward is to ensure each memory cell gets more equal use by only formating the card as needed- like when its 80% full. A 4GB card allows for somewhere around 670 shots in RAW, so that shouldn't be too frequent for me.