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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

16 Gig CF Cards not mounting

Sun Disc 800

Sun Disc 800

Using the sundisc 800 we have had 2 cards down. For the first one red replied that they managed to mount it on a lexar reader.... I have tried a lexar that day that the incedent happened with no luck... So, if the blame is on the reader avoid the sun disc 800. I know that this is a hard thing to say, but narrowing down probabilities is the only way to go for now.
 
Can you let us know which ones to avoid for now?

Unfortunately, the details we have about what's happening out in the field is too sparse to point at particular readers. Meaning that there have only been a handful of cases and amongst those it's near impossible to get a very detailed picture of things like which readers a card has been used in, cables, use practices (ie. pulling cards before eject has finished, etc). Definitely stay away from the cheap usb readers as they're usually only qualified for slow cards.

As a somewhat separate side note, we've also seen a number of reports of higher quality fw800 readers going bad after awhile and corrupting footage. I'd recommend running a test on your readers every once in a while.
 
I'd recommend running a test on your readers every once in a while.

How does one do that? I've used both premium FW800 readers from Sandisk and Lexar (2 separate Sandisks actually) and had cards fail (in camera) while both types of readers were being used. But the vast majority of cards work just fine.
 
It wasn't always an immediately noticeable cause/effect which made it particularly tough to hunt down until we got a bad card reader from a user. Ie. cause is not syncronous with effect but usually somewhat close. Since the issues were statistically very very low but clustered around a few users, we were able to narrow it down more accurately.

Is it that certain users have bad gear or that certain users just use a wider sample of cards? In the last 2 months, I've used about 120-150 different 16GB cards. Most users probably only own about a dozen [if that?] cards of their own.
 
How does one do that? I've used both premium FW800 readers from Sandisk and Lexar (2 separate Sandisks actually) and had cards fail (in camera) while both types of readers were being used. But the vast majority of cards work just fine.

One simple way is to take a large file that fills up most of the card and do an md5sum on the file. Write that to the card and do an md5sum on after copying or reading the file back. There are tools on the pc that check integrity on windows and I can't remember the name of one I saw on the mac.

Maybe that's a nice feature for Conrad to add to R3D data manager.
 
So if we do checksums [MD5 and greater] on every CF transfer we make and don't hit issues... chances are that our readers are not the problem?

Sweet. :)

As I said... "As a somewhat separate side note".
That's referring to a separate issue where readers go bad regardless of what type of card you're using.
 
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