Do you monitor your SD card?

[tmanz]

So you've got a brand new dashcam. You're ready to record the driving world, protect yourself, and show all those 'other' drivers that they need to go back to driving school. Most of us know that we need fast memory to support our camera's capability, so we buy the most reputable card, and of course it must be class 10 or above! Plop it in and all is well right? - not all the time. Generally our memory cards go through rigorous tests before they fly out from manufacturing, but a lot can happen between then and once its nestled securely in our cameras.

In order to ensure your card is fighting fit perform a speed test and check for bad blocks on your card. This should be done periodically across the lifecycle of the card, before placing it in your cam and afterwards. How often you check your card is up to you. The aim is to catch a failure before it corrupts your data.

Tools of the trade - formatting and checking for bad blocks:

• (Win - my personal favorite) Rufus - https://rufus.akeo.ie/ : normally used for creating bootable drives, this is still an excellent tool to format disks and check for errors. To format, uncheck boxes for bootable disk and creating extended labels. To check for errors, select the number of passes (this takes A LONG time depending on capacity - do it overnight, this tool does not show read/write speeds)

• (Win) H2testw - Google Translate Website : the standard for testing for fake memory and errors, shows speed of memory.

• (Mac) sdspeed - Website : mac version of H2testw, shows speed.

Minimum read/write speeds for classes of memory we deal with:

• Class 10: 5 MB/s, for Full HD (1080p) video recording and consecutive recording of HD stills (high-speed data bus)

• UHS Speed Class 1 (U1): 10 MB/s, for Real-time broadcasts and large HD video files (UHS bus)

• UHS Speed Class 3 (U3): 30 MB/s, for 4K video files (UHS bus)

What do you use to format and test your card with?

 

[runtohell121]

I use SD Formatter for Windows and Mac. Choose the full overwrite/erase function.
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

 

[Sunny]

So far I only have max of 32GB cards and they all are formatted in the dash camera.

 

[SawMaster]

My first dashcam and I'm new at SD cards of any kind, but I formatted mine with my laptop using whatever Win8.1 defaults to. It seems to be working fine with VLC player, G1W-c, and my Samsung card.

 

[daniel_bel]

Cards either formatted in cam or with supplied utility (sport or dash).
Never checked in daily recording.
During holiday trips (several times a year), cards copied to HD and copy quickly checked daily, then card overwritten next day.

Usually cards are reformatted before a trip.