Expensive Brand Name Memory Cards: Worth the money
I felt like a sucker for buying a $90 2GB Sandisk compact flash memory card with my digital SLR camera.
I mean, it's a decent price, but I ended up getting a 4GB no-name card for almost half price a month later!
Sadly, a month after that, while on vacation - two days before the end of the trip, actually - the 4GB card died on me.
Fortunately I had a total of 8 GB of photo storage on various cards with me: so even if the big card is totally gone, I have far more than enough photos.
Doubly fortunately, there are some excellent shops in the Toronto area that can recover data from dead media. Cross your fingers for me - hopefully they can resurrect the finicky card.
One thing you can be sure of - I'm not trusting anything remotely valuable to that 4GB card ever again - assuming it ever even becomes usable!