I just thought of something

rpcrowe

Reading the posts on a thread about CF write speeds, I thought of something but, I didn't want to hijack the thread.

On a computer a larger hard drive or at least a hard drive which has more usable space will outperform a smaller hardrive or a hardrive which has limited space available.

Does this work the same for a CF card, or am I talking apples and oranges?

Will a CF card with more empty space be written to quicker than a CF card with limited space?

ziggy53

Larger capacity cards of the same technology and make/manufacturer tend to be slower than smaller cards in the same class. I have noticed that all cards slow down as they are filled and I generally try not to fill cards nore than 75-80 percent, unless I have to. That last little bit tends to be the slowest.

P.S. I have noted this before:

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=729457&postcount=5

craig_d

rpcrowe wrote:

On a computer a larger hard drive or at least a hard drive which has more usable space will outperform a smaller hardrive or a hardrive which has limited space available.

Does this work the same for a CF card, or am I talking apples and oranges?

In some ways it's apples and oranges and in some ways it isn't. For one thing, some CF cards are really little hard disks (microdrives), while others are flash memory. The performance characteristics of hard disks and flash memory are somewhat different.

However, the hardware alone doesn't tell the whole story. You also have to consider what filesystem is being used. The hard disk in your PC, if you're running Windows XP or later, is probably using the NTFS filesystem rather than the ancient FAT32 filesystem that is commonly used on CF cards. If your computer is a Mac or runs Linux or some other non-Microsoft OS, then it uses some other filesystem. Different filesystems have different performance characteristics. Some of them degrade more precipitously than others as they fill up. FAT32 is particularly bad in this regard; it's really just a simple extension of the old FAT12/FAT16 filesystem first used on MS-DOS floppy diskettes and hard disks in the early 1980s, and I'm sure the original designers did not expect it to have to deal with multi-gigabyte volumes.

There is also the question of what constraints apply to the implementation of any given filesystem when you're talking about a specialized device like a camera. Your computer has a much faster CPU and much more memory than your camera. Having more memory allows it to use more memory for disk caches, secondary indices, and other performance-enhancing mechanisms. A camera, by contrast, is a much more restrictive environment for software. Filesystem performance will probably degrade more precipitously in a camera than in your computer.

rpcrowe wrote:

Will a CF card with more empty space be written to quicker than a CF card with limited space?

On average, yes.