SD card capacity question on SL-2

[roverover]

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I've noticed on my SL-2 that several of the SD cards i have inserted do not offer their full capacity in the camera when they are reformatted and empty.
On average, i am seeing about a 7% decrease in available space on the cards, for example a 128 GB card shows 119 GB of available usage space in the camera.
I presume this is an intentional scenario, but was wondering why this camera requires a 7% reserve

 

Edited July 8, 2021 by roverover

[beewee]

It’s the way gigabytes are defined.

SD card manufacturers define 1GB as 1000,000,000 bytes. In reality, 1GB is 1073741824 bytes and that’s what Leica uses.

[roverover]

2 hours ago, beewee said:

It’s the way gigabytes are defined.

SD card manufacturers define 1GB as 1000,000,000 bytes. In reality, 1GB is 1073741824 bytes and that’s what Leica uses.

Thanks for defining that, it makes sense and accounts for the approximate 7% difference. I appreciate the info. I checked the SL forum and could not find
any posts regarding the SD card capacity discrepancy that i discovered so decided to ask.

 

[6bit]

16 hours ago, beewee said:

It’s the way gigabytes are defined.

SD card manufacturers define 1GB as 1000,000,000 bytes. In reality, 1GB is 1073741824 bytes and that’s what Leica uses.

Apple defines 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. 

[beewee]

Most storage companies or companies that sell storage use the 1,000,000,000 byte definition because it’s a way to inflate numbers and it’s customer friendly in that people are use to base 10 system.

1GB in the traditional definition within the computer science domain is 2^30 bytes = 2^10 x 2^10 x 2^10 = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes

[lucy63]

Which memory cards are recommended for the SL2s? Thanks.

[beewee]

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I’ve been using Kingston Canvas React UHS-II 256 GB cards without any issues. They are fast, reliable, and fairly economical compared to other reputable brands like SanDisk.

From what I understand Leica does testing with SanDisk so if you want to have absolute peace of mind, then you can go for that but it’ll be more expensive than Kingston. Kingston has been around for decades and they make pretty high quality cards.

[Eclectic Man]

In addition to the above posts regarding how Gigbytes are defined, memory cards are often listed as the actual amount of memory on the card, they omit to inform the buyer that some of that memory is used up by the software to manage the card.  So there is inevitably less than the advertised memory available for image storage.