Jo22 wrote on 2020-03-10, 02:04:

I don't disagree, but.. Even my oldest consumer grade CF cards from the early 2000s still work, despite they were very often bei […]
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Horun wrote on 2020-03-09, 22:57:

I don't disagree, but.. Even my oldest consumer grade CF cards from the early 2000s still work, despite they were very often being fully written to.
Until a year or so, one of them was used weekly to playback movies/films by the help of an old video player. The card is still fine.
Also, even the simplest CF cards do implement a form of wear leveling. Again, even the simplest CF cards! 😀

I totally agree with what you say. The "cycles" I mentioned are write cycles, that is where the limits are, not the reading. So as your example, lets say writing 10-20 movies a week X 52 = 520-1040 per year the CF could last 10-20 years. Windows can write a years worth in a single boot up, do something, shut down. My example of the camera was typical studio work with 100's pic taken daily (1oo's writes). You make a very good point especially about FAT16 versus FAT32 !

Has anyone considered the power as a possible issue?

If you're using an ATX power supply with a CF card, Windows 95 and 98 can power down the computer and it's possible that the CF card is internally mid-write / mid-cleanup when Windows shuts the power off.
Windows is expecting a hard drive, which would have finished its activity the moment the IDE channel stopped doing anything. Perhaps disable APM to see if that helps.

I've also had really bad luck with 256MB CF cards though, I think they're likely to be old & slow enough that they get caught out like this, while newer 4GB cards don't. Though that's only on a 386, I'm power cycling enough that eventually I start to get file corruption.