Over the years, I have used many different memory card readers from Lexar, SanDisk and other third party manufacturers. I have never managed to damage a memory card because of a bad memory card reader, but it can happen. The failed write operation completely killed the memory card to the level that I could not even format it anymore. Needless to say, I lost all the work prior to the failure, so it was not a pleasant experience. Ever since, I have been paying close attention to the battery level – the moment the camera flashes with a red battery sign in live view, I swap the batteries out. Better safe than sorry! 10. Safely Eject Memory Cards – Don’t Just Unplug Them Memory Card Capacity– The capacity of the memory card is typically displayed in large numbers. As can be seen here, this memory card has a total capacity of 128 GB. Another tip for memory cards is not to buy the super large capacity ones. If you average a few hundred shots on your memory card, that’s good enough – you don’t need a memory card that can accommodate thousands of pictures (exception would be wildlife photographers, who shoot a lot of frames). The same goes for unplugging memory cards from computers – you never want to just remove a card while data is being read from or written to the memory card (again, write operations are particularly evil). The best practice is to safely eject the memory card via your operating system before removing it, which can be easily done in both Windows and Mac operating systems. 11. Avoid Static Charges

The role of memory cards in a photography workflow should not be underestimated – a failed card may lead to many problems and frustrations. In my opinion, nothing is worse than telling a newlywed couple that their entire wedding was lost due to a bad memory card. While a commercial photo shoot can be re-shot, even at a great cost, it is nearly impossible to re-shoot a whole wedding.Sony announced on June 1, 2009, that M2 support in Sony Ericsson phones would be dropped in favor of microSD. [31] As you can see, there is a big difference between High Speed, UHS-I, UHS-II and UHS-III cards in terms of maximum bus speed. While the original cards were pretty much capped at 25 MB/sec, the UHS-I bus interface lifted that to 104 MB/sec and the newer UHS-II bus was able to triple that potential at 312 MB/sec. The newest UHS-III standard is very new, but it enables insane theoretical speeds of up to 624 MB/sec.

Maximum Read Speed– This is the maximum sequential read speed the memory card is capable of in Mega Bytes per second (MB/sec). Please note that write speeds are rarely ever published on memory cards and you will need to find that information in memory card manual or listed specifications. In this case, the maximum read speed of the SD card is 160 MB/sec. Below is a summary of different memory card speeds, their versions and theoretical maximum speeds. We limited the table to card types that are in use today: Memory Card Name Memory cards obviously come in different sizes. While older memory cards were limited to megabytes, newer memory cards are much larger in comparison and can be commonly found in 64 GB and larger sizes. Some of the latest generation memory cards offer 512 GB memory card capacities. Memory card capacity is typically clearly indicated on top of every memory card and you should be able to easily find it. If you are wondering how big of a card you should get, it really depends on a number of factors such as: what you shoot, how much resolution your camera has, whether you shoot RAW or JPEG, what RAW compression option you use when shooting RAW and whether you shoot a lot of continuous action. For example, a 16 GB card might be sufficient for a portrait photographer who shoots selectively with a medium resolution camera, whereas a wildlife photographer who shoots many bursts of images, or a landscape photographer who takes high-resolution panoramic images might find even 64 GB memory cards to be somewhat limiting for their needs. Memory Card Speeds Amemory cardis an electronic storage device used forstoring digital media, such as photos and videos. In photography, memory cards are commonly used in digital cameras, varying in type, form factor, capacity, speed / class and brand. The most common memory card formats today are SD, microSD, XQD and CFexpress, although CompactFlash was also a very common memory card format for many years. Memory Card Types / Form Factors The only case where you might want to avoid deleting images is when you have two memory cards setup in overflow mode. As I have pointed out earlier, your camera will place images in the first memory card that has available space, so if you keep on deleting images from one card after the camera already started putting images on another, you might create a mess. Also, if you do decide to delete images from your camera, make sure that you take your time and only delete what you need – some cameras are designed to continue asking if you want to delete images and if you are not careful, you might also accidentally delete previous images. Memory Card FAQIf you do not like an image, or if it comes out blurry, it is OK to delete that image, but don’t rush with the process – take your time to delete only the image you need to delete. On many cameras, if you don’t pay attention to prompts and go too fast, you could accidentally delete more than one image, which could be a problem if your earlier image was something you were happy with. I have had a case when I was shooting a wedding and I managed to delete more than what I needed to delete, just because I pressed buttons too fast. If you need to delete an image you are not happy with and you shoot something very important, just do it later, when you have the time. Or if you do not want to risk it, skip image deletion in your camera and do it during your image culling process. 9. Keep Camera Batteries Charged! Shortly, the card will start to copy-paste data already on card. This forced data reallocation puts the card needlessly through extra write cycles and wears out the card faster. A lot faster.