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Zax TRX900LA: which brand of SD card?


Brian Whitlock

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Michael,

 

I do not recommend using anything but what is recommended. I got burned on a job because I used Kingston Cards and they would just randomly stop recording when they felt like it. It also wasn't like they didn't work right out of the packaging either - they worked flawlessly for weeks, and then decided to fail when I was in a remote location where next day Fedex delivery took 4 days..........

 

~Thomas Popp

Video Mantis

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Michael,

 

I do not recommend using anything but what is recommended. I got burned on a job because I used Kingston Cards and they would just randomly stop recording when they felt like it. It also wasn't like they didn't work right out of the packaging either - they worked flawlessly for weeks, and then decided to fail when I was in a remote location where next day Fedex delivery took 4 days..........

 

~Thomas Popp

Video Mantis

Hello Thomas,

 

The cards I bought on ebay are Sandisk Micro-SD cards. I've been using them for 8 months now without any issues. 

 

BTW, thanks a million for all those Zaxcom vids! They really did help me learn the system and gain the confidence I needed to use it properly. That, and the occasional "oh shit, what do I do" phone calls to Jack Norflus. haha

 

Caution eBay can be hit or miss. Counterfeit cards do exist and you do get what you pay for.

Yeah, I was afraid of that too but haven't had any problems with the cards thus far. The seller I recommended is in the U.S. and they advertise the cards as being 100% Sandisk. 

 

Since they're cheap enough it wouldn't hurt to buy one and try it for yourself. Yes, I agree there is comfort in spending more for something from a brick&mortar store but in this case I haven't had a single problem. =)

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Keep in mind that when you use zaxconvert, you deal with the whole capacity of the card so if you got an 8Go card and always use only 1.5Go for your daylies, you're losing some time waiting for the 8Go to unload to the computer so you can after treat the actual files you recorded.

Like Jack mentions; a 4go card will give you 24h of recording so you'd be fine for 2 big days of work on it.

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I still wish someone could explain to me why higher capacities should be avoided and why there is a "segment number" limit even if you don't hit the full capacity of the card.

Higher capacities don't need to be avoided, they're just not that necessary. As for the segment limit, that has to do with the formatting of the MARF system in the transmitters - basically it pre-allocates 255 segments or positions for data to fill. This is also why your card is 'full' when you format it in a TRX, and why there's a delete.me file on there too - it's pre-allocating space for an update file.

 

The file size doesn't matter, but the start of each segment is given a unique identifier, and once you've used as many segments as the system can handle, it can't make any more. It's quite different to 'normal' computing file systems.

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What's been said, if there's a downside to having a high capacity card, is that if you don't upload/save your files on a regular basis you risk losing more data if the card fails.
Apart from that I don't remember reading more technical explanations that would lead to problems having higher capacity cards.
Same in the photography world.
 

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254 is pretty close to 256, which is the maximum level of 'steps' in 8 bit code... It may not be a function of MARF per se, but there's no such limit on 'normal' FAT32 formatted disks.

 

edit: well, there is a limit on FAT32 clusters (a cluster is up to 32KB, a FAT entry uses 4bytes), but its 268,435,445.

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Thanks for all this info. I was going to start a thread asking about these, but now I know. I bought 32gb cards on ebay for my fusion. I got extremely lucky because they're a random brand from a random place and they work flawlessly.

Are you sure they're flawless?

 

Here's what really happened in counterfeit or knock off sold state devices in the past :

The required number of physical flash chips is missing.

The firmware on the controller is tweaked to show that writes are working correctly when they are going into space.

Reads just pull something random from the existing chip.

Worse - the writes can all go to the one chip - overwriting something already there and most likely destroying the file system.

These cards seem to work fine for the first couple of weeks before data starts to get sent out to the non-existent flash chips.

 

This kind of counterfeit is less easy to do now because there is usually only one memory chip in there - just different capacities.

But, the problem still exists when that flash chip is deliberately mislabeled as a higher capacity part. 

How often do you destroy your SD cards to check that the flash chip capacity matches the model capacity?

 

Most people just think it's an early life failure, and throw it out when their computer reports errors with it.

There is no limit to the ends that knock-off manufactures will go to to squeeze their costs down when there there are no real consequences (no warranty, no class action lawsuits).

 

Buy brand name, buy from a reputable dealer, one less thing to worry about in your gear bag.

 

Tom.

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