Poll request: compact flash failures

I bought a second hand "Photofast G-Monster CompactFlash CF 533X UDMA 32GB". They get good reviews but it kept causing an error on my A900 every 10 or so shots. Turning the A900 off and then on again fixed it for another dozen shots but after a few cycles of doing this I realised it was corrupting most of those shots it appeared to be saving anyway.

I returned the card to the seller and now revert back to using the sandisk and transcend (CF) and Sony and Sandisk (MS) cards that I've always used without fault.

I've had a 32GB Transcend 400x fail in my pile of a dozen or so CF cards of various capacities.

I find it interesting that quite a few in this thread comment that Sandisk is faster than Lexar. In my experience, using 300x or 400x cards, Lexar always seemed faster, both when downloading and when clearing the camera buffer.

i had two trandence 16gb 133x bail out on me slowly after ample warnings. I was about to start a thread on this. Sandisk however is still going strong.

I have always Bought Patriot LX 32gb 10x cards. I have never had problems with them on the a77 but the a99 will not use them.

stiuskr wrote: 1-Have you ever had a card failure? 2-What size card resides in the camera? 3-Do you download with a card reader or the camera tethered? 4-Do you delete all pics or reformat after downloading? 5-How many frames has the card seen? From these choices here I'd be most interested in the first two.

1 - no
2 - 32Gb class 10
3 - card reader
4 - reformat always
5 - aprox 1200 raw, 1700 jpg

I use 16 and 32 Gb Patriot LX class 10; CF and SDHC cards, which I always
download with a card reader and delete after downloading.
I only reformat the card occasionally.
I have never had any sort of problem with these cards used this way.
As an aside I have always been told to use this method in case there is a power surge
or power failure or lightning strike etc, with the camera connected to the computer.
Better to blow a card rather than the camera.
I have actually had a lightning strike on my computer.
Fortunately it blew the first link in the chain which was the modem.
It literally blew the modem chip apart.

I've worked in photographic retail for a number of years now and certain things do seem to stand out - XD cards (remember those?) are like timebombs - they always seem to fail eventually (I'm guessing that's down to the controllerless cards depending upon the camera to do wear levelling) but aside from cheapo eBay jobs, I've not seen many SD/CF cards actually fail over the years - as others have said, corruption is a different issue and seems to be largely preventable by reformatting the cards after each use. Unless you're buying a Samsung/Toshiba/Sandisk card, it's a bit of a random bet as to who made the flash memory inside it anyway.

Now the casings of SD cards breaking, and bent pins in CF slots - are a different story. For some reason I've had several Sandisk SDs disintegrate on me within the last few years, lucky they've got a lifetime warranty! Perhaps it's just coincidence and there's nothing wrong with the shells of Sandisk cards, but these cards were all far newer than the much abused PNY 16GB card which has been in and out of cameras so much in the ~5 years I've owned it that all the writing on the label has worn away!