John Navitsky
Well-known member
there's something fishy about their full format tho. as far as i can tell the in camera full format on the cfe-b card is fast enough that i don't think they touch all the card.As noted in another reply, I didn't discover that it allowed a full-format of CFe but not XQD until this morning as I'd not tried to format a CFe card in it until this morning when someone mentioned that their Z8 showed that option. Very odd that Nikon doesn't allow full-format on SD or XQD. Could be due to the slower write rates on those cards compared to many of the CFe's. Format speed is directly tied to the read/write rate to the card when doing a full-format. Try doing a full-format of 1 or 2TB CFe card on a slow USB port!
but if they don't touch everything, it's unclear what exactly they ARE doing and how it's different than the quick format.
it's possible they may leverage some sort of reset feature that is present in cfe-b and then do a quick format on top of that. if this were the case, then it might explain why it's not available on sd and xqd.
unfortunately, they rarely give details about what's going on under the covers
edit: i'm pretty convinced at this point that the nikon full format probably issues an nvme secure erase command to the cfe controller which erases the contents, then they probably do a quick format on top. bread crumbs about how secure erase works: https://superuser.com/questions/1530363/how-to-securely-erase-an-nvme-ssd
Last edited: