Use a 1TB SD Card? Not on your life mate!

Every so often in both drone and GoPro forums and user groups pops up the question “what is the best 1TB SD card to get and where from”?

Take it from one who knows, just don’t. And here’s why in a real-world example.

Some years back now I was in Hervey Bay in Queensland (Australia) filming a segment for a mate who had a fishing show on TV at the time. I was using the original GoPro Karma drone for the job (these are no longer available but basically were a large drone that used a GoPro 7 as the main camera).

Anyway, we got the footage we wanted, brought the drone back to the boat and just as we removed the card for safety, a large pod of whales surfaced all around his boat.

I hastily put a newly formatted card in the drone and sent it up again and had got a heap of new footage when the drone controller warned the battery was running down. The drone was about 100 metres away, so I called it home – back to the boat.

At no more than 3 metres from the boat, the battery suddenly died and my GoPro Karma dropped like a stone into 20 metres of briny in Hervey Bay never to be seen again.

Drone, camera and footage. All gone.

As it transpired, early Karmas had a battery warning fault that was out off sync with reality (duh!) and this is why it happened – and why these days I allow a good 20% margin on the stated battery life of my drones. I am still wary flying over water too as you might understand.

Anyway, here’s the nub of the story.

The original footage we had wanted to get we still had as we had changed cards. Sure we lost some really good whale footage, but if I had had a larger card in the drone (say 256GB as I was running 64GB cards at the time), we would have lost the lot and THAT would have been tragic.

So my recommendation is to always split your footage over smaller cards thus avoiding that potential issue.

For what it is worth by the way, I have been using Verbatim cards for some years now and have never had an error on any of my cards.