It's OK to boil your memory card: official
PrintBut don't crucify it, it'll break
Posted in Peripherals, 2nd August 2004 13:32 GMT
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If you ever want to destroy a digital camera’s memory card, don’t bother putting it through the wash or hitting it with a sledgehammer as neither will guarantee destruction.
According to a Digital Camera Shopper magazine investigation cited on The Beeb, five of the main memory card formats - CompactFlash, Secure Digital, xD, Memory Stick and Smartmedia - will happily hang on to your data despite being boiled, washed, dunked in cola, run over with a skateboard and worse: being given to a six-year old who was instructed to destroy the cards.
The xD card and the SmartMedia card even survived being hit with a sledgehammer and nailed to a tree, although it did take a data retrieval expert to get the photographs out.
Staff at DCS expressed their amazement: “We knew modern memory cards were durable, but had no idea they would be quite so tough." quoth editor Geoff Harris. He suggests that the UK’s 18 million digital photographers should still back up their pictures, presumably in case of the card being struck by lightning during a tornado which has driven a nail through the memory card and thrown it two miles into an inconveniently-sited blast furnace.
The BBC report does not say why the staff at DCS felt the need to abuse defenceless memory cards in this brutal fashion, but we say it is a job well done. ®
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