I have no problems with CF, SD nor MicroSD cards - some many years old and used quite often. I once bought cheap microSD card... it was probably a fake. It lasted a month.

I see... Thanks for the information. Old hard drive is getting harder to find, so I guess I'm resorting to CF.

CF cards are fine provided that you don't go out of your away to abuse them or use up almost all the space, there are some SLC based models though I do wish that the adapters didn't cripple the performance to ata 33.

I sometimes use CF units with 286 systems - with M$ DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1 and in 486 or newer - real HDD's - as win 9x swaps and that will ruin a CF soon)

Also bought a SCSI50pin-2.5''-SD adapter for macintosh powerbook 180c but haven't tried it yet(

This is the problem with my Micro SD.

The file record20150420172920.3gp becomes 0 byte. It was originally 20 megabytes of sort, but the file is corrupted and becomes 0 byte. Naturally, it becomes unplayable. It also happens with video too.

Same goes with pictures. They went blank, because the file is corrupted. I haven't got the chance to take a look at the size, but I guess they are 0 byte too now.

This gradual loss of files worries me. What would happen if I use CF to substitute hard drive? I hope CF is more durable.

SD does not have any logic, its a dumb medium that if written to the same block many times over will die pretty soon;
how did You check that it is not the FS that died here, but the medium is indeed unreliable?

mrau wrote:

SD does not have any logic, its a dumb medium that if written to the same block many times over will die pretty soon;
how did You check that it is not the FS that died here, but the medium is indeed unreliable?

How do I know whether the FS that dies? I'm just losing files randomly and gradually, that's all I know. I worry the same will happen to CF.

I suspect that SD cards are more often the victims of counterfeiter than CF cards let alone due to their sheer mass circulation.

mrau wrote:

SD does not have any logic, its a dumb medium that if written to the same block many times over will die pretty soon;
how did You check that it is not the FS that died here, but the medium is indeed unreliable?

Edit: For a long, time I thought the same. But it seems, modern hi-capacity SD cards contain ARM/8051-style controllers.
So by calling them "dump", we essentially mean that SD cards do not contain a full computer interface.
Like Compact Flash cards do have (IDE). http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3592

I used compact flash card for photography. I've only ever bought Sandisk cards and of the 10 or so that I've used over the year, a pair of them developed issues and became unusable.

In my experience, SD and microSD cards (Kingston and SanDisk) are pretty reliable. But those no-name brands or counterfeit ones can be a pain in the ass.

mrau wrote:

SD does not have any logic, its a dumb medium that if written to the same block many times over will die pretty soon;
how did You check that it is not the FS that died here, but the medium is indeed unreliable?

SD cards DO have wear leveling, the exact implementation is manufacturer specific though. A sector also has ECC data so even if few bits here and there are faulty (up to a point), the data can be recovered and moved elsewhere. Also when transferring data, there is CRC to know it's been transferred OK through the bus. Most likely the robustness flash itself and the wear leveling and error correction algorithms correlate with the price of the card.

In fact the wear leveling might even be the cause of data suddenly getting corrupted/missing, as whenever a sector is written, it is possible that it gets relocated to another position by the wear leveling algorithm, so it needs to erase a block and copy sectors there. If the host turns power off too early data might get lost.

Also, a tale from a friend who was working at a mobile phone company; after using SD card for a while in a phone, the filesystem would get corrupted. The friend went over the filesystem code etc but found no issues there. Then he wrote a test program that simply used the card as raw storage, storing known stuff to known places until the corruption happened. Turned out the SD card wear level algorithm was buggy and the SD card manufacturer provided a firmware upgrade to fix the situation.

I had a 8GB, 10 year old CF card used off and on as an IDE drive in various machines suddenly start corrupting data on it... so yeah, they definitely go bad. While I was pissed it went bad, I probably did get my money and times worth out of it.

not had a problem with CF but then I don't use my cards much, photography or otherwise.

With SD I think I've only had problems with corrupted files using a Sigma camera which produces 46mb files and takes ages to clear the buffer [writing to disk]. Pretty sure my corrupted files are down to me not realising th writing was still going on, and turning the camera off.

When shooting video, you may need a fast SD card or you could I guess get issues though I'm not sure of the nature of these.

Finally, my son had an SD card go bad in his phone but we got all his stuff back with the Sandisk utility in a PC. Card has been fine since - that's a couple of years of constant use. I could imagine the phone battery died when writing to the card and that caused the issue maybe.

I have noticed that my PC doesn't like CF cards formatted in-camera - reports an error and suggests it fixes them. This is mainly with an old camera and old 512mb cards. Also noticed that old readers can't read new cards . A new reader does the job. Actually had similar issues with some SD cards I think.

I wonder whether the variation in the firmware or whatever - in cards as well as readers - may be a contributory factor to the errors.

Then again I don't hammer my cards; once full I keep them as a kind of extra backup.

There are incidentally tales of particular models of certain brands of card being best avoided. But other websites indicate SD and CF are like CD/DVD media insofar as you don't know what's going on under the hood. Examples of the same brand/model may have different circuitry and component standards etc from batch to batch.

This a DOS PC?
Thing to consider is in your device your constantly read/write/delete files. Probably on a daily basis.
On a DOS Games PC, once all setup the only be a few bytes updating savegames, high score tables, things like that.
And only used for a few hours a day if that if your lucky.

chinny22 wrote:

This a DOS PC? Thing to consider is in your device your constantly read/write/delete files. Probably on a daily basis. On a DOS […]
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This a DOS PC?
Thing to consider is in your device your constantly read/write/delete files. Probably on a daily basis.
On a DOS Games PC, once all setup the only be a few bytes updating savegames, high score tables, things like that.
And only used for a few hours a day if that if your lucky.

Windows 98 PC. You can imagine the amount of writing from Windows' Virtual Memory. 😵

Also installed a 8gb CF in my Digital Venturis 466 (486DX2-66 with 20mb of RAM) - it has DOS 6.22 and Win 311. I notice that in Windows 311, when I use ACDsee 3.1 - pictures are being loaded quite fast, even in comparison with a Pentium-1 with common HDD in ACDSee and win 95. I loaded there a lot of my pictures to show in exhebitions to modern people and to play with in Photoshop and Corel Draw)

Had a very bad experience with a Kingston 8MB CF card that was bought in a retail blister pack at Fry's (so I'm confident it was legitimate). In a single session I installed DOS, installed/reinstalled a game 3 times (don't remember what issue I was having) and on the 3rd attempt started getting disk I/O errors. Total joke, but maybe it was a fluke. I haven't tried CF on a PC since, but I'd be willing to try it again if I had some reason to.
I do have a couple Transcend 4GB cards that are reportedly suitable. I bought them for another project that I never ended up doing.

I've also had issues with various SD, MicroSD, GameCube, and PS2 memory cards. I don't trust such dumb Flash devices. SSDs are probably a lot better, my experience with those is still young.

A user in AK forum also has similar concern. However, another user claimed CF card is more stable in the long run than microSD.

Anyone has similar experience?

CF cards die too, but different than hard drives, when all the read/write cycles are used up. i guess there's no reliable storage options for retro PCs