SD card needs to be formatted a7iii

[geoffreyg123]

Hi Yall,

Yesterday I was on a shoot with my a7iii and I've never had SD card problems before so I was just using one SD card - new 'tough' one, biggest size is it 128g? Anyway when I tried to take off the images it said "card needs to be formatted and you will  lose your data' bla bla  - I've lost the images they were't that important it was my second camera not used much on the day.

 

What is best practice for SD cards - should I format in camera before every shoot? I've heard the a7iii has had some issues regarding this - is this solved with the latest firmware?

 

Also, now I will always be using two cards in my A7iii - when using two cards, will they both be slowed to the slowest card speed? Or will it still work at the speed of the fastest one? whilst the second one works in the background...

 

Thanks a lot

[Chrissie]

The general advice is, to always format SD cards in-camera, not outside of the camera. Some people are concerned about wasting one of the limited write cycles which sd-cards are able to sustain. Personally I don't share those concerns as I don't shoot that much as to likely hit that limit. That said: formatting a card does count as one of those write cycles. The benefit of formatting is, that you eliminate fragmentation of the available free space, which might otherwise become an issue when recording movies.

If you want to record the same content to two cards simultaneously, you will have to wait for the slowest one to complete its write. How could it be otherwise?

On that note, it doesn't (in my view) make sense to spend somewhere in the four-digit price range on a body and lenses, and then crippling that investment by trying to save a two-digit figure on an inadequate memory card.

Edited March 14, 2019 by Chrissie

[EricC]

I always use SD Formatter on every new card, and then insert it into the camera and format once again inside the camera itself.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

SD Formatter is the SD Associations own formatting program.

QUOTE

The SD Memory Card Formatter formats SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card and SDXC Memory Card (respectively SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards) complying with the SD File System Specification created by the SD Association (SDA).

It is strongly recommended to use the SD Memory Card Formatter to format SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards rather than using formatting tools provided with individual operating systems. In general, formatting tools provided with operating systems can format various storage media including SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards, but it may not be optimized for SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards and it may result in lower performance.

END QUOTE

[Chrissie]

The result of the first formatting on your computer will be overwritten by the second formatting inside the body. So you might just as well skip the first step.  8-p

Since we are talking about using a card in a Sony body, I would stick with Sony's recommendation, which explicitely states:

Quote

When you use a memory card with this camera for the first time, we recommend that you format the card using the camera for stable performance of the memory card.

...

Format the memory card on this camera. If you format the memory card on the computer, the memory card may not be usable depending on the format type.

There is a slight (non-zero) chance, that Sony has not fully implemented the SD card standard as recommended by the SD Association. In that case I would expect, that Sony knows best what Sony cameras require.

But - see my tag line - give both methods a try and decide on your own.

[tinplater]

Write cycles supposed to be over 100,000 so I have never concerned myself with exhausting a card on that basis.  I reformat after as little as a few shots, just to have nothing on the card but the current shoot.  My little Canon SL1, which I have used for years daily posting Ebay images must have been reformatted perhaps  thousands of times and the card (and camera) just keep right on functioning.