Fastest Flash?

wxwax

I'm thinking about getting a camera and shooting in RAW. The camera, not me. That means a lot of memory. So I'm wandering around the web, looking at Compact Flash options.

I see a 4GB Lexar that writes at 40X. I see a 2.2GB microdrive that writes at 3.3 Mbytes/sec. I see a 1GB microdrive that transfers at 38.8 MB/sec. I see a 1MB Compact Flash that writes at 2.8MB/sec. I get the feeling no-one's using a standard measurment for transfer rate, and I suspect it's on purpose.

With my future high-speed camera, I'll want the card that holds the most at the fastest speed. Forget about the microdrive's fragility for a moment. Just talk about speed and memory size. What's the fastest out there?

patch29

Start here if you have not seen it yet. It will give you a lot of info. Your new camera the 1DmkII is not there yet and I would think we might see some memory speed bumps at PMA.

fish

Interesting question. I asked around and the camera shop doods said the 10D would not take full advantage of a 40x card. I can't find anything about that in the specs and when I checked on the Canon site, it gives this less than helpful bit of info:

Due to the ever increasing number of companies manufacturing and selling CompactFlash cards, we cannot test and evaluate all the different brands, sizes, and speeds of cards available in the retail market. Any card with a capacity up to 2048GBthat adheres to the Type I or Type II CompactFlash card standard, and is formatted with a FAT16 or FAT32 file system, should work in your camera.

Unfortunately, because we have not tested the camera with all speeds, sizes, and brands of CompactFlash cards, we are unable to speculate as to the performance of the camera with a particular card installed, or to recommend a specific type of card.

As far as I can tell, the 10D is not write acceleration enabled.

A good source: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

wxwax

patch29 wrote:

Start here if you have not seen it yet.

Roger that. I saw the page at dpreview, not this one. Thanks.

wxwax

Roger this, too. Good news.

By comparison, the EOS-1D responds to ever-faster cards by writing ever-faster. In fact, the EOS-1D sports one of the fastest write interfaces ever tested here.

wxwax

Here's an interesting thing. RAW files are much larger than JPEG. But the camera writes RAW files to the CF card a lot faster than it does JPEG files. I assume the delay is due to the in-camera processing that's being done to the JPEGs?

zero-zero

Yessire.