SDXC Cards Warning

farss wrote on 11/18/2013, 2:24 AM

We recently purchased 2x 128GB SDXC cards and someone put one into a non SDXC compliant device and formatted it as exFAT. That reduced the card's capacity to 24GB :(

AFter a lot of Googling and installing an update and a utility after two goes at using the utility I was able to recover the card to its original 119GB capacity.

Never use a SDXC card in a device that's not SDXC complaint.

If you do stuff the card you should be able to recover it but not the data using the SD Formatter utility from: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

You also need to ensure you have the latest patches for your OS, links to them are on the same page as the utility.

Note that to recover the full capacity of the card you need to do a Full Format using that utility.

I'm mentioning this because more of us are using these cards. The BMPCC does not have the capability to format these cards nor delete clips. Be careful what you use to do either of those chores.

Bob.

Comments

GeeBax wrote on 11/18/2013, 4:55 AM

Thank you for a good timely warning Bob. BTW, did you catch the clip posted by the guys from Denmark. They had an issue with formatting a 64GB 95Mbit/s card. you can hear about it here: http://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/1239-first-raw-footage-from-the-blackmagic-pocket-cinema-camera?page=1

Geoff

Arthur.S wrote on 11/18/2013, 6:01 AM

Best advice is to always format using the device it's intended for. I can remember a loooonnng time ago having problems with a card because I formatted it with Windows not the camera it was for.

farss wrote on 11/18/2013, 2:56 PM

[I]"Best advice is to always format using the device it's intended for "[/I]

Good advice except:

1) The device the card was intended for doesn't provide that facility.

2) Before even plugging a card into a device check that the kind of card is compatible with the device. A device that's SDXC compliant will be fine for SD, SDHC and SDXC. Plugging a SDXC card into a device that's only SDHC compliant is asking for trouble. The same applies to USB card readers.

Bob.

Arthur.S wrote on 11/18/2013, 3:33 PM

That's a bummer Bob. :-( Lucky to get away with it though :-)

farss wrote on 11/18/2013, 3:45 PM

The problem is a challenging one :(

In part because these devices store configuration data in a "protected" area of their memory. It seems that area of memory isn't all that well protected, after all there has to be some way it can be written to.

The other aspect is that both Windows and OSX treat removable storage devices differently to fixed devices. I came unstuck with this and Compact Flash cards. I now have a CF to SATA adaptor that I'm yet to try to use to recover several expensive CF cards that have mysteriously gone AWOL.

Bob.

Serena Steuart wrote on 11/19/2013, 12:47 AM

Interesting. Thanks Bob.
I've put a Sandisk Extreme Pro SDXC card into a BMPCC and records RAW nicely. Don't know what the Danish guys did. Maybe they re- formatted the card before using.

farss wrote on 11/19/2013, 3:30 AM

I don't know what the Danish guys did either but what "we" did was this.

Put 128GB card in camera, shoot footage over weekend. Put card in SDHC reader, plug reader into Mac, offload files. Then to "clear the card" formatted it as exFAT. Card capacity became 24GB.

As far as Windows was concerned the card then had two partitions but nothing would let me repartition the card. I found various tips on the web, none of which worked. Eventually I found the SD Card Utility and with that after a couple of goes got the card back to 128GB.

It probably helps avoid problems in the field to get everyone to treat the cards as you would a roll of film.

Bob.