Are SD cards good to go without being formatted on occasion?

country_hick

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I can give some anecdotal evidence.

The other day my dash cam started to turn on and off over and over again as though the power was being cut off and renewed every 15-30 seconds.
Nothing I tried such as unplugging the power changed this behavior. The screen went blank (total grey scene) instead of showing the road with a button push that turns the screen on. The rear camera stopped showing up. Admittedly this is a $10 no name 1080 solo or 720 with the rear cam recording at 480 that I got for $10. If the cam had died it would be worth the purchase as it had over a years use.
I took the micro sd card out. I reformatted it in the computer. The dashcam would not work with that card inserted prior to the reformat. After reformatting and a H2test showing everything was fine then a second format the same dash cam worked flawlessly when the same micro sd card was reinstalled. I may have 10,000 miles since doing anything to the card before it got corrupted somehow.

Should you format your micro-sd card now and again? I can only say I had a strange dashcam malfunction that was apparently caused by a screwy (but not actually defective) micro-sd card and was cured by formatting that same micro-sd card. Why the card got corrupted I have no idea. Apparently the cam wrote something wrong once and that was a problem. On the other hand maybe a sector just swapped its identity on the micro-sd card for no reason causing the card to refuse more write cycles. Either way recording stopped completely.

Although I disike the method chosen I do appreciate the cam having a feature that apparently is designed to tell me when the micro-sd card has a problem by causing the cam to reboot every 15 to 30 seconds when the card can not be overwritten.

This is an example why you should carry a spare micro-sd card just in case something like this happens to you out on the road.
 
The recommendation have always been to format your memory card in its camera every few months, this will reset the file allocation table.
Back in the old days of computing and windows you could get a almighty fragmented hard drive which would slow your old spinning hard drive right down, and then had to run defrag to get things back in line.
But on newer computer and operation systems it is my understanding it is not needed anymore, at least i have not done it for a long time, and unlike in the older days i don't do a clean install due to new hardware every year or so. the memory cards can also go or be strange, i once had one of a few kingston cards, but that one care just would not work in one of my cameras, but in any other camera it was good.
And a similar kingston card was also fine in that one camera.
 
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