Photographers love to go on and on about what gear they use, and why they made that choice. One topic that I hear covered ad nauseum is the size of their flash memory cards. Bigger is better, right? Not necessarily, it seems. Many photographers love to argue that using 1 really large flash card is just like putting all your eggs in one basket. That is, if a CF or SD card goes bad, you could potentially lose a lot more of your images than if you had used multiple smaller cards instead.

While that logic seems perfectly reasonable, I take another line of thought on this one.

I’ve made many thousands of images over the years, and I’ve never had a card go bad. Don’t get me wrong, I know that these things are a lot like hard disk drives and that statistically they WILL eventually fail. But that hasn’t happened to me yet. So while I am careful with my cards, and I am definitely concerned about one of them going bad and corrupting my files, I don’t think that it’s the most likely way that I will lose my images.

I have physically lost many pieces of photography gear over the years, including a couple of very expensive CompactFlash cards. So for me, the far more likely way that I would lose images would be to lose or misplace a full card after I changed it out for an empty one.

For me, this choice is easy. I use the biggest and fastest memory cards I can afford. Currently that means Lexar 8 GB 300x CompactFlash
cards, but I plan to upgrade to 16 GB cards soon. I also have some older SanDisk Ultra II cards and I’ve never had an issue with any of them or with any of my Lexar cards.

Am I putting all my eggs in one basket? Maybe, but for me that makes more sense than having a bunch of smaller cards that are difficult to manage and keep track of.

What about you? One big card, or several smaller cards?