SD Card Failure - Anyone else?

Question

I had one of 3 Transcend 1G cards result in complete failure, loosing about 400 pictures of Costa Rica birds. Neither the camera nor computer would recognize card after the shoot. Disk Doctors disassembled the card and hooked it up to test modules and ran multiple 5-6 hour tests to try to reconstruct data. Nothing worked as they said all the files were corrupted. This is the one disk that I shot until full with a Nikon D40X camera. Card was formated before use. I reviewed pictures as I shot and all seemed right.
They theorize that perhaps the card and camera did not communicate, but I shot at most only a couple of RAW format pictures over the capacity, so to me that does not seem logical it would corrupt everything. But not an expert either.
The technician said not to fill up the card and use smaller cards so you don't have all the shots in the same basket. I know there are a lot of experienced and professional photographers out there that read this forum, has anyone else run into this kind of problem before?

Answer 1

>The main purpose of putting my problem online here is to alert users that card failure is always a possibility and to keep that in mind when shooting.
true curt. and good advice.
my main purpose for posting was to remind users that if the data's that important, don't mess with it. there are data recovery services that can and will usually get the data back when disaster strikes.
I nearly used one last year when a hdd crashed with about 7 years of personal digital images on it. in most cases i would say forget about it and get a new drive, but these were irreplaceable pics of my kids growing up! i finally was able to get the data read off it after freezing it for a couple days. (and it's now backed up several times! :) ) but next step was to send it to a recovery service ( from seagate, the drive maker, which would have run me about a thousand bucks.)
I knew enough from being involved w/systems for the last 20+ years that running almost anything on a drive you need to recover data from lessens the chances of being able to recover that data. all i tried was reading. with the freezer trick, i finally got it to work.
it all depends on how much value you place on the specific missing data.
recent extreme data recovery example:
Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/07/1834224