I chose SanDisk because I know they are a respectable company and although the failure rate on these devices is low I would rather not take the chance and be covered by some decent warranty this time around.  My expectations weren’t let down when it arrived either as it is so small and light -- it’s pretty in a way.  However the orange light when connected is a bit of a let down when a nice blue or green colour would have been more modern.  The finish seems to be of a high quality and the rubber casing will also prevent those nasty scratches it will undoubtedly attract while being thrown around on a computer desk. So 8gb should do me fine for a while and I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong but I seriously doubt it, mind you I thought that last time.  Right, now I need to go and transfer all those files I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t be bothered to burn to disc…

Well my words seemed to jinx it and after a successful two week usage period I encountered the beginning of the end.  I use my memory stick between two different Operating Systems with Mac OS X and XP so I tried to minimalise any potential system conflicting errors by having it formatted in the FAT 32 system.  I first hit problems while transferring large files where Mac OS X used to hang on the process so I thought “Ok small error it won’t happen again.”  I was wrong again and while transferring even small pictures I then discovered when I plugged in to another computer, all that was copied was the file name but no data. This situation continued for a couple more weeks until it seemed it had had enough – the next time I plugged it in it was recognized as 8mb in size not 8gb.  So it seemed it had bitten the dust so I tried the following:

1. Backed up what data I had on the memory stick however by this time it was already corrupt.  Luckily only a few non-essential files were lost.
2. Tried Mac OS X’s disk utility to repair any permissions but this option was not available
3. Finally reformatted the memory stick in a hope to start a fresh.

After these steps I had limited success initially but within the hour I knew it was past help.  I also tried data recovery programs like Data Rescue and some others to no avail – if you have any ideas go ahead and comment below and I’ll give them a go as I have nothing to lose!  From my limited knowledge I believe there was probably a bad memory sector on the flash drive and that equates why the computer reads a capacity of only 8mb.  It’s a real shame because I could really use a USB drive bigger than 2GB and I’ve learnt two lessons from this experience. Spend more time researching products and buy from a reputable company and never, NEVER rely on a memory stick for your data. Always have a hard copy on a DVD or other hard drive if the data is that important. Lessons now learnt – lets move on.

Now this is where some confusion arises -- SD and SD HC cards are not entirely compatible with everything.  For instance an SD card reader may not work with an SD HC card unless it specifies and these problems are hard to see.  The confusion starts because they look the same but they work slightly differently with different device firmware to get that extra space on the card. I hope the manufacturers start to make it clearer on the packaging but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay here but also google it to check. I’ve heard some good reviews from it but if you’re not wanting to fiddle inside your pc, or have a laptop (I’ll answer to both of those) then a usb card reader may be easier.  Now there are tons of these on the market including SDHC compatible ones so be careful to choose the right one, but for your money the Sandisk MicroMate USB card reader looks good as well as the Integral SD reader. I’ll be buying one in the next couple of days and I’ll let you know what happens as it’ll be a lot easier this way with my camcorder not having to plug the beast into the usb every single upload.

Anyway I checked the internet a month ago and saw this 32gb SD HC card come out mid-August for £59.99. Yes you read that right -- £59.99 and thats a lot of money for such little memory nowadays when I could buy a 750gb External Hard Drive for the same amount. However the beauty, and large cost, comes from the fact it’s so small and there is no difference in size of a 1gb SD card to a 32gb SD HC card. With this installed in my camcorder I can get 7 hours and 13 mins of footage! Now that is amazing on such a little card! That’s amazing really and it seems larger cards are on their way soon as with all the sectors used on an SD -HC card we could see memory of 2048 GB! I can imagine next year this same card will be about £29.99 if that with electronic prices dropping so much in the past few years…oh well I can say I had one first.

]]> http://www.daz4590.co.uk/wordpress/2008/08/23/32-gb-sd-hc-card-yes-they-really-exist/feed/ 4