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Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
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to shoot at the full size this camera is capable of, be prepared
to move beyond your 512K and 1GB storage cards!
CompactFlash Troubleshooting
Problem
: The capacity of your CompactFlash card seems to
be a little less than the one stated on the label (e.g. you seem
to only be able to store 114MB of data on a 128MB card).
Solution
: Actually, this is normal. CompactFlash works just
like a disk drive on a computer, with an area set aside for a
file allocation table and a file directory. In addition to the
reserved space, storage manufacturers sometimes use 1K to
mean 1000 instead of the more correct 1K=1024. Also, the
number of folders created has a small impact on overall
capacity. Like disk drives, sometimes areas of the card are
marked as “bad,” and this, too, reduces capacity.
Problem
: It seems to take longer to store information on a
CompactFlash card than it did when you first obtained it.
Solution
: If you erase individual files instead of reformatting
the card, it’s possible to get file fragmentation on the card.
When this happens, data for any given file is non-adjacent,
and the camera has to write extra information into the file
directory. This, in turn, can cause slightly longer write times
due to the extra information that must be written in the
directory (and on Microdrives, the extra head positioning that
must be performed slows the process even more).
Likewise, it’s possible for cards to get lost clusters
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and files
on a card. Use the D300’s format function to erase all
information from a card instead of individually deleting files.
Alternatively, you can reformat cards on your computer if you
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Clusters are the basic unit in which information is stored on disk drives (and
CompactFlash). A file is made up of many clusters, and the directory and other
information stored at the beginning of the disk keeps track of which clusters belong to
which files. When a cluster is damaged, the information being tracked is lost. This
means that your data may still be intact, but that the structure of the disk is incorrect,
hiding that data. As noted elsewhere, having a good disk recovery utility handy can
sometimes help you retrieve precious photos you thought the camera had lost
forever.
