On Fri, 17 May 2002 16:05:45 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: >> ouch! You mean the CF cards in cameras are this fragile? > >So I'm led to believe, yes. I haven't done any testing myself. But you >don't subject them to that kind of treatment in cameras - cameras always >shut down nicely, and you rarely rip the card out while it's writing.
I think I posted some info about my experiences a while back.... that may have been on the embedded list though... David, how many other reports besides mine to you have of the CF's developing a problem? We use both SanDisk and SST CF's in a couple of projects and most of our failures are during the development cycle. Go figure... We haven't had that much problem in the field but then these products are pretty low volume and I don't think they are treated that harshly wrt power cycling. The biggest issue I have seen is sector 0 going south on me. It develops a CRC error. When that happens the CF is pretty much useless. Widows and Linux both choke on a device that throws a read error in the partition table. According to a SanDisk tech it should be possible to reclaim the CF if you can wipe the problem areas with Zeros using a low level write. That should reset the CRC. What he told me can happen is that if power goes flaky during a write it botches up all the state machines in device and causes it to write an incomplete/invalid CRC. So far I've only seen sector 0 become a problem. Of course it never gets past sector 0 so I really don't know if the rest of the disk is ok or not. I'll eventually get around to writing some code to try and recover one but it's prettly low on the list right now. -- Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 501.846.5777 x204 Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com
