formatting Sandisk CF w Nikon D200 ??

That's not true either...
But it usually is a bad idea to fill a harddrive to capacity if it's your windows drive, because the swap/pagefile is on that drive, and if it hasn't reserved that space specifically then you're gonna notice some slowdown. Not to mention the fact that if it needs to add files or use temporary directories, you're SOL. So yes, it's good to leave a bit of room...but it can't kill a drive.

Actually, I had 2 corrupt Hard disk problem, 1 PC and 1 Toshiba Laptop. I remember the technician said All because I loaded nearly full capacity of the Harddisk. I'm not expert in computer, so I really don't know if it's true of false, but after that I never load my hard disk more than 75% of it's capacity. I've been changing several times and never had similar problem ever since, now I'm still using my 4 years old VAIO Sony, and 2 years old HP PC. I begin to worry and planning to upgrade my PC because the capacity is already surpass 80%.

Sideburns, I'm glad you can join the conversation because what I was saying about Hard disk problem is 100% pure from my own experience based, with your expertise in this area, I believe you can give much better explanation than me.
 
Actually... I sadly speak from experience on the corrupting of the contents of a 2 week old brand new CF card. I did not mention it because it is rather embarrassing. I had to do not a quick format, but a full format to make it useable again, the recovery software that came with my did nothing for me. The card was fine after a full format.

And no, a camera (at least not my D200) cannot tell you in advance how big a picture will be, therefore, how can it know if it will fit that last one or not?

My NEFs range from (on one shoot to another ) from 14.9MB to 16.4MB depending on several factors but me not changing the file size, compression or quality settings. The camera will try to average it but it cannot know in advance how big that picture will be. I filled an 8gb card and it failed on my last pic... no pics were ultra important as I was playing downtown, so I had no issues with the lost pics, but it was still a PITA and a lesson to learn.

This is no false assumption or rumor... this is a true fact and it happened to me. I leave the choice for all to do as they wish, we are all big boys and gals here.

And discussing about hard drives, if one fills a system volume on most Windows operating systems from Windows 95 to Vista to very close near capacity and the page file is not set at a fixed size, it will not slow down at that point much at all (it does slow down when your physical ram runs out and tries to replace it with virtual ram AKA your swap or page file), you will get a low HD space warning and if you ignore that, as the swap file tries to expand to accomodate the needed extra virtual ram, and fails, the operating system will then sometimes (but not always) give you a nice BSOD. If the BSOD happens, you have about a 50% chance of having corrupted your hard drive.

A lot actually depends on what program your called that needed the additional RAM and how it responds to the OS telling it there is not enough memory to run it. A poorly written application will try to force a write to a portion of memory already used by the OS, and thats where you get your BSOD.

As far as a secondary drive or partition, you can fill that to 100% capacity without concerns as long as you do not place a pagefile or use it as a location for temporary files that the OS needs.

Well, that's very surprising. I will accept your experience, and trust that you have had this problem. It seems kind of weird though. What I meant about the camera knowing the size of the next pic...I meant, that it should assume it's going to be the biggest possible size it knows could happen...but I guess once in a while, this could fail.
It just makes no sense to me why that would happen...when I shoot, the last 10 pics probably, the number changes a few times, and after "2" you never know if you're gonna get a 1 or a 0...lol. At least from what I've experienced. I've also shot the card full a few times, and haven't noticed any corruption. I've even shot full, deleted some throw aways and kept shooting until full again...
YMMV I guess though, so thanks for sharing your experience.
I thank you for not being upset with my rather quick post.

Actually, I had 2 corrupt Hard disk problem, 1 PC and 1 Toshiba Laptop. I remember the technician said All because I loaded nearly full capacity of the Harddisk. I'm not expert in computer, so I really don't know if it's true of false, but after that I never load my hard disk more than 75% of it's capacity. I've been changing several times and never had similar problem ever since, now I'm still using my 4 years old VAIO Sony, and 2 years old HP PC. I begin to worry and planning to upgrade my PC because the capacity is already surpass 80%.

Sideburns, I'm glad you can join the conversation because what I was saying about Hard disk problem is 100% pure from my own experience based, with your expertise in this area, I believe you can give much better explanation than me.

Well, I believe your "computer tech" was yankin your chain.
While it is pretty much always a bad idea to load up your windows drive to the brim, you can load any secondary drive pretty much all the way, and it'll not cause any problems. It may be slow, because it doesn't have room to move stuff around, but it will still work.

The most I'd leave as "bonus room" is probably 2% of the total space. I mean...4GB on a 200GB drive...even that seems like a lot. But still...if you wanna be safe, that would seem a like a good place.

Don't go loading up your harddrive just because I said it was ok, though. If you feel comfortable with what you're doing, that's fine. It's working, and that's what matters.
 

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