When I first bought my digital Camera I found out that the capacity was 10,400 pictures.
So far I have taken 3229 photos but most of those have been moved off the card or deleted.
So at this time there may be 100 Photos on the card?
Sure big cards hold a lot but for what purpose? Like you I transfer the photos to my computer at least once a week and daily if on holiday so there are rarely more than a couple of hundred pictures on the card at a time. These big cards are rarely used to capacity.
The only exception is my Dashcam which fills the card then deletes the oldest video to store the latest. I discovered my cam was not recording and it turned out that it had worn out a good quality class 10 chip with its constant recording and erasing. That has not happened with my still camera but I have changed all the SD cards just in case.
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Little bit about memory cards
How many photos can go onto a memory card depends on the file size the camera has so there is no set number a card can take. the larger he file size the less photos . Also another big mistake many make is just look at thje GB size of the card, forgetting to even look at the MB/s speed. The fastest should be on the camera handbook. So what does this mean?
Well if a card is too fast the camera has to “buffer” (waiting until there is more room to accept more photos) a good average speed would be around 90MB/s but my camcorder can take up to 200MB/s (mega bytes per second).
For making a video other factors come into play ,such as the graphics card being able to handle videos. I found this out and upgraded the one in my previous computer and now in the computer I a use now. Same thing will happen, a bit of the video will play then buffer (wait) until there is enough room to play the next bit.
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As to what remains on a card if deleted? everything the data is still there (check exif data on an existing photo) there you will find how miuch information there is. Even formatting a card will not wipe everything off, the only thing that will is when the card is overwritten.
Sometime one might just come across a policeman or someone in authority asking the photos to be removed. No problem, show they have been removed/deleted as they can be recovered later on using a recovery program. 
unfortuately I can’t show what an exif data looks like due to only being a level zero member
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oops error
if the camera is too fast the card has to catch up
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There are plenty of programs that remove existing data. I keep the free open source program Eraser on my computer just for that purpose though, frankly, there is nothing in my photos that need erasing permanently.
I do use it to erase files that contain ID and banking information. It can also be used to completely erase any information within the free space on any hard disk.
I think you mean “If the card is too slow” - personally I just buy Class 10 SD and mini SD cards these days they cost very little more than Class 2. Class 10 is good for anything up to and including 4K. The more data stored on a card also slows it down as the camera has to find the “end” before it can store anything.
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Exploring SD memory cards is so exciting isn’t it . From finding a serial number showing it is genuine on one edge to reading the information on the face. I could spend many happy hours doing just that.
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Not convinced it is exciting but it can be frustrating.
My dashcam stopped working before Christmas, it turned out it was the Mini SD card that had given up the ghost because of the constant repetition of writing and erasing. It was still readable but had slowed down to the point where the camera could not write to it while erasing older files.
Until then I had been happy with 32Gb cards but replaced it with a 128Gb one,it will be interesting to see how long it lasts.
strange you should say that. Tthe the built in car sat nav started playing up. Fixed it by putting in a new latest edition SD card.This happened only the other day