I recently bought two 64GB SanDisk Extreme Plus SD cards via a seller from China on Ebay. The seller has a near faultless record, and of the literally thousand of positive feedbacks the only real complaints have been a handful regarding non arrival - there are literally hundreds, even thousands, of buyers who bought SD cards from them that have said they were fine. So having done my due diligence I bought the two cards at an obviously good price, the idea being that I wasn't going to use them as my front-line storage on my camera, but as the backups in the camera's second slot. Day to day (and week to week if I'm away while doing photography) I use other backups as well, like a flash drive, my laptop, and an external hard drive.
When the two cards arrived I immediately went to format them each and give them a speed test, but when I did so the Windows format utility said that there was only a measly one megabyte of space available on each of the cards, even after I tried formatting them. I tried using SD Formatter, but that came up with the same issue. I even went with an idea I came across online to open up one of the other utilities (I can't remember what it is now, but it's like opening up in DOS, typing in the exact disk, and then typing in 'clean'. All that did afterwards was give me the same deal that the cards needed formatting, yet when I try popping up the Windows utility or SD Formatter, I now get a different reading that says 'unknown' for size and renders an error message if I try formatting say that the operation can't be performed.
Now on the face of it you'd think both SD cards must be duds, right? Yet here's the thing. If I put either of the cards in my Nikon and format them there they both work flawlessly - once done the camera says I have enough space to shoot 1.6k exposures in my preferred RAW/Jpeg format, which is what I should be getting. And if I connect the camera up to my PC, I have no trouble at all downloading the pictures to the computer. So why the hell am I having this issue where the PC seems to have all sorts of trouble with the cards, but my camera's fine with them? I even tried slotting them directly into our laptop and I get the same error messages there. I can't help but think there's some kind of technical issue here given that a) they work fine in the camera, b) the images transfer over to the computer from the camera, so the storage is there, and c) the vendor doesn't have a track record of selling duds d) what are the odds I'd get two duds when everyone else seems to have no issues?
If anyone has experience of this and can suggest a solution I'd certainly appreciate it. Given that they seem to work fine via the camera I'm willing to keep them, but I'd certainly like to nut out why the PC is having such a problem with them.
Thanks
When the two cards arrived I immediately went to format them each and give them a speed test, but when I did so the Windows format utility said that there was only a measly one megabyte of space available on each of the cards, even after I tried formatting them. I tried using SD Formatter, but that came up with the same issue. I even went with an idea I came across online to open up one of the other utilities (I can't remember what it is now, but it's like opening up in DOS, typing in the exact disk, and then typing in 'clean'. All that did afterwards was give me the same deal that the cards needed formatting, yet when I try popping up the Windows utility or SD Formatter, I now get a different reading that says 'unknown' for size and renders an error message if I try formatting say that the operation can't be performed.
Now on the face of it you'd think both SD cards must be duds, right? Yet here's the thing. If I put either of the cards in my Nikon and format them there they both work flawlessly - once done the camera says I have enough space to shoot 1.6k exposures in my preferred RAW/Jpeg format, which is what I should be getting. And if I connect the camera up to my PC, I have no trouble at all downloading the pictures to the computer. So why the hell am I having this issue where the PC seems to have all sorts of trouble with the cards, but my camera's fine with them? I even tried slotting them directly into our laptop and I get the same error messages there. I can't help but think there's some kind of technical issue here given that a) they work fine in the camera, b) the images transfer over to the computer from the camera, so the storage is there, and c) the vendor doesn't have a track record of selling duds d) what are the odds I'd get two duds when everyone else seems to have no issues?
If anyone has experience of this and can suggest a solution I'd certainly appreciate it. Given that they seem to work fine via the camera I'm willing to keep them, but I'd certainly like to nut out why the PC is having such a problem with them.
Thanks
