Many moons ago, but well after the age of troglodytes, I learned from a technical publication that Windoze XP polls flash drives that are connected to the computer. It performs "random" read/write operations, which eventually wears out a flash drive. The article recommended using the "safely remove hardware" feature of XP to disconnect the drive and removing it. Even though flash drives have a 100,000 cycle lifespan or better, leaving it connected impacts those numbers to a substantial level.
I'm thinking that the SDHC card in the contourHD is virtually identical in operation, which puts its lifespan at risk when charging. I've now developed the habit of ejecting the card once the video is transferred, although I suppose that just telling the computer to remove it should be enough.
Overkill, or sound practice?
This is the first I've heard of Windows doing random writes to a removable storage device. If it's true, then the question is, how often does it do this?
I imagine if Windows does do this were walking about a very small read/write. Perhaps a couple KB. It would probably take years before that had any noticeable impact. Normal use of the camera is going to wear out a card long before any little system checks like that effect anything. If a few KB goes dead on the card.. that's not even a single second of HD video. No biggie.
I read about XP polling the flash drive when connected, about the same time I had paid over a hundred dollars for a 512mb usb drive. Since I had shelled out so much money, I paid attention to the information and I rarely leave a flash drive plugged in once the purpose is served. I've searched the 'net just now and found only messages about not using flash drives for page files, for swap files, for constant and regular use, as such use will wear out the electronics within.
My current research also indicates that Windows NTFS performs a read operation periodically and that such operations cause wear on the flash memory.
My concern is that I had been leaving the card in the camera while charging, and even after being fully charged, leaving it connected. I'm aware that the card shows up as a drive, which means that XP was polling my card for days at a time.
Just today, I discovered that popping the card "loose" worked fine, but bumping the camera makes the card fall out and become difficult to find in a cluttered work area.
One other thought. Sure, it's okay to lose a fraction of a second of video, but if the segment of the card that's become worn is where the file structure is located, the entire video is lost.
Manufacturers do not want to provide warnings of this nature, as it would make the product appear difficult to use. Worn out cards have to be replaced, which also means continuing revenue.
Out of curiosity I left my computer on overnight with two SD cards. One in a ContourHD, the other in a card reader. Using Process Monitor I logged all filesystem activity.
The result after about 10 hours..
Neither of the cards were ever read from or written to (although my C: drive did have periodic reads/writes).
My cards are not formatted as NTFS though (I'm using FAT32) so maybe that's a factor.
Or maybe what you read was referring to having windows actually installed on flash memory. Based on my findings that would indeed be a bad idea.
As for leaving your cameras plugged in, I don't think there's anything to worry about.
when you start or shut down a computer it does some activity, i see the light flashing on my built in reader on my laptop.
i have a SD card for backup storage in the computers SDslot, not worn out yet