Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

Thank goodness for some good things. I just returned from a 3 week photo trip and captured some photos that I was pleased with. I stored them on a WD EasyStore 4 TB drive that was 3 weeks old. When I got home, I plugged it in to import my photos to Lightroom to find that my hard drive failed. Severe hardware failure. I did have about 1200 of the 2022 NEFs still on my XQD cards, but I was missing over 800 raw images, and of course, some of my better shots. I could feel that sweaty panic in my stomach and the dizziness developing as I realized that I was probably SOL and stuck with low res exports that I created for temporary web viewing. Devastated, I sent in my drive to a data recovery company who rapidly replied that the could save my data. After negotiating to the best price I could, I agreed to pay the $1,000 fee, today.

Tonight, for some reason, I took the SD card out of my second slot and stuck it into my computer. To my delight, all of my images were on the SD card! When I set up my new camera, I had chosen to save a backup on the second card. In my haste of devastation, I completely forgot that I had done this. I am relieved and pleased.

So for those of you who think that the second drive is not that important, it probably is not, until you need it! Nikon Mirrorless with one slot, maybe you will figure out how to correct this.

rjaywallace Loc: Wisconsin

Congratulations on this amazing discovery. Did you immediately cancel the disk recovery extortion payment? Don’t envy you now tho, having to cull, sort and process 2,000 or more images - a lifetime of work ahead. Hopefully the results will be worth it. Good luck.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Precisely why I chose the D7100 with TWO slots. It is for this very reason that I like having the two. Piece of mind, knowing that you’re “covered”.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

I certainly did! Happy to have the images. I can sort pretty quickly.

rmorrison1116 Loc: Near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

although a few of my cameras have dual slots, when I'm using a camera with 1 slot I make sure I have plenty of empty cards on hand. Even though I prefer a camera with two slots, I grew up with single slot cameras so it's not a deal breaker. Just have a fresh card ready when you need it. If the argument is, what if the card goes bad. In the 20 years I've been doing digital photography, I've had 1 SD card fail and it was a well used cheap card.

Besperus Loc: Oregon

For the same reason I use smaller cards (1 card slot Canon) and change them out hourly if possible (when shooting massive numbers of images). If one card goes south, shame on me. Two would be better, no doubt, i have a limited budget. I was a pro photographer years ago. Times has caused me to down grade to where I am. But I know my limitations and work around them as I can afford to do so.

Haydon

There's been plenty of discussion on both sides of the fence with dual card slots. Personally I won't buy another camera with a single. Two of my three SLR's have them. The third camera (T2i) I seldom use anymore. As mentioned, most of the time you won't have an issue but it only takes one precious moment to find that sick feeling building with thoughts of lost photographs. I see a second card slot just like a backup hard drive for your images. You may not get a second chance if you do not take precautions. Rationalizations of single card slots will NOT bring your images back.

BTW Robert, thanks for sharing this story!

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Highly improbable that BOTH card slots will fail at exactly the same time. I LOVE having the two slots. I’d hate for thousands of vacation photos to be lost if the one card or SD slot failed. Nice to have a backup.

Besperus Loc: Oregon

Shoot pro equipment as you wish. If you make $ doing it...great. If you have the budget, super. Not everyone has the option to go out and spend 3k on a body or an additional 2k on a lens. I may be exaggerating, but not everyone can jump on the mirrorless bandwagon no matter who builds the camera. Is it the future? Probably. I’ll pick up a good used body, pro level, in a few years, if priorities persist. I’m not young. But a nice old 5D would work for me. I don’t do video.
If I need to, video cameras are available to do it better. And renting works too!
Production companies have done that for the past 50 years.

RWR Loc: La Mesa, CA

Or, you could have avoided all that angst simply by making sure that all files were safely loaded onto a back-up hard drive before erasing the card.

A.J.R. Loc: Devon, UK

Never having a camera with 2 slots can anyone tell me if the 2nd card has to be the same speed (and capacity) as the first card?

HT

No, they don’t. For example a late model Nikon will have an XQD and an SD card as the second slot.

The SD Card is typically much slower than the XQD, by a lot. One of the problems for those insisting on sending an image to both slots for redundancy however must understand this results in camera performance being tied to the slowest card.

If you wanted a D500 for its fast FPS and 200 frame limit in continuous burst, for example, then your expectations won’t be met because the SD card can’t keep up. Same effect if you put a slower card into either slot for a camera with two SD cards.

I know that’s drifting off topic but I haven’t seen anyone mention it to date...

DaveO Loc: Northeast CT

I wonder how much of a lag occurs in a camera with two XQD slots. Probably be difficult to measure unless under extremely controlled testing.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

They were safely backed up on my hard drive, that failed. I would not have erased the card until I had them back in my home computer with multiple backup copies. The reason I deleted them from my XQD card was that I filled then 6 cards I had with me and needed the space. I do have a fairly thoughtful procedure to insure that this does not happen. Just ran out of cards. Choices was to either not shoot or to erase a card.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

Not in my D850. I have a 64gb card in slot one and a 256gb SD card in slot 2. I have never had a buffer speed issue.