SD to CF Adapter speed...

RhuarcRhuarc Registered Users Posts: 1,464 Major grins
edited February 23, 2007 in Accessories
I just received my SD to CF adapter, and I am trying to figure out what is going to be the limiting factor from a speed standpoint, the SD card or the CF Adapter. The adapter says it has transfer rates of up to 16.6 MB/s. The straight CF card I have is 120X. What does this translate into fomr a MB/s standpoint. I have an SD card that is 1GB, but I don't k now the speed. When I do a burst on my XTi till the buffer is full it takes 25 seconds with the CF Adapter and the 1Gig SD card, where as with my 120X CF card it takes 12 seconds. I'm just trying to figure out if getting faster SD cards versus slower ones if I will get a performance boost.
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Comments

  • LuckyBobLuckyBob Registered Users Posts: 273 Major grins
    edited February 22, 2007
    Lexar defines 1x = 150KB/sec, so a 120X card should theoretically hit 17.58MBps. It sounds like you'd need around a 120X SD (Edit: my bad - fixed the typo) card to eliminate bottlenecks, provided the adpater actually hits quoted speeds.
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  • RhuarcRhuarc Registered Users Posts: 1,464 Major grins
    edited February 22, 2007
    Actually it would be a 120x SD card, not CF, since the adapter is for an SD card. But I get the idea, thanks for the help!! I'll have to keep that in mind when I'm looking at price vs size vs speed. SO far from what I have used of it this dapater works perfectly. It is as though it was a CF card in the camera or computer. And I guess it is about a 120x, maybe a little slower, adapter. So it would work for the high speed stuff. It might bottleneck the system if you were to get a 150x card, but it wouldn't be by too much. Besides, what is the write speed of most cameras? Can they even hit those speeds?
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  • RhuarcRhuarc Registered Users Posts: 1,464 Major grins
    edited February 23, 2007
    I just did a little bit of testing using an 11 burst shot RAW on my XTi using two cards. One was a 120X 2GB CF, the other was a 66X 1GB SD using the SD-CF Adapter. From the time the CF activity light came on, until it went off (total writing time for the burst) was as follows. The CF clocked at an average of 15s, while the SD came in at an average of 29s. It looks like the adapter is allowing ATLEAST a speed of 66x. I need to get ahold of a high speed SD card to test things faster than that. So far so good.
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