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Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
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avoid using the Quick Format option
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. Generally, I don’t
recommend formatting a card with a computer unless you
know that you need to absolutely restore the card to a known
state.
If you use Windows XP to format a card, be sure to specify
FAT
(
FAT16
on some computers) if your card is less than
2GB in size, not the
FAT32
format normally used by a PC
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.
Note that Windows Vista uses a different file format as
standard, and you must make sure that you use a FAT format
when formatting cards.
CompactFlash cards that have solid-state memory do have a
limit to the number of times that they can be written to.
Fortunately, you’re not likely to hit that limit (usually in the
hundreds of thousands of times) in the lifetime of your D300.
You’re more likely to encounter problems with the D300’s
shutter mechanism (typically good for 150,000 cycles or
more) before you will with your CompactFlash card.
Moreover, the controllers in CompactFlash cards are
intelligent and should recognize when a sector has been
written to the maximum number of times and remove it from
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Virtually all disks and storage devices have a few “bad sectors” on them. That’s
normal, and all manufacturers “mark” these sectors with a flag in the tables at the
start of the drive, so that the operating system doesn’t use them. But if the flags get
erased for some reason, they aren’t restored with Quick Formats (which is what most
digital cameras do, by the way—they rely upon the memory controller in the card to
catch any sector failure and map it out). Likewise, if another sector eventually goes
bad (which eventually happens on all drives), it isn’t found and marked by Quick
Formats. If all that isn’t enough, there is a difference between a “low level” format
and “high level,” or “logical” format. Bottom line: if you begin experiencing
problems with a single storage card, try performing a
full
format of it on a PC. This
may mark a sector that has gone bad and restore the usefulness of the card. If that still
doesn’t correct the problem, you’ll probably have to return the card to the
manufacturer for replacement.
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The D300 supports FAT32, but using FAT32 on cards that are 1GB or smaller is
inefficient. Unless you have a card at least 2GB in size, use plain old FAT. Moreover,
Macintosh users don’t have easy access to FAT32 facilities. If you know what you’re
doing, you can drop down into the command line interface and use something like
newfs_msdos -F 32 -b 32768 /dev/disk1
to format your card, but this is a utility for
advanced users who know what they’re doing.
