fastest biggest cf cards?

rutt · April 4, 2007

Is fast 16 gb a reality? Waht's most cost effective.

Manfr3d · April 4, 2007

The tendency on the market seems to be that
high capacity cards with 4GB and more are only
a few % cheaper than buying several 2Gb cards
for example.

It's also worth noting that 2Gb cards are generaly
the fastest cards availabe. If you buy 1 4GB card
its ~500kb/s slower than a 2Gb card, a 8Gb is ~1mb/s
slower than a 2gb card and so on.

If you're into Sandisk check out their Ultra II series
its almost half the price of the Extreme IV cards
but only slightly slower (when writing in camera).

If you want ultra fast go with 2GB Extreme IV,
if you want high capacity (and can live with the
risk of loosing many gb worth of images in case
of failure) go with an ultra II 8gb or 16gb card.

My obersvations are based on the amazon sandisk
prices and the CF/SD Performance Database on
this site: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

wxwax · April 4, 2007

Sandisk Extreme III

I shot a 12GB on a 1DmkII last weekend, and noticed it took an awfully long time to clear the buffer, much longer than normal. I only noticed it when the card was 75% full, so not sure if it was that way for the entire card.

I have a 16GB in the mail, be interesting to see how slow it is.

rutt · April 4, 2007

RiData 150x 8gb? I've been using these and they are pretty fast and pretty cheap (about $84). The climax of the ballet year is coming up and I'm sick of worrying about filling up cards and chimping during intermissions.

Manfr3d · April 4, 2007

wxwax wrote:

Sandisk Extreme III

I shot a 12GB on a 1DmkII last weekend, and noticed it took an awfully long time to clear the buffer, much longer than normal. I only noticed it when the card was 75% full, so not sure if it was that way for the entire card.

I have a 16GB in the mail, be interesting to see how slow it is.

SanDisk Extreme III is about 1mb/s faster than Ultra II
(at least for Canon 20D/30D if I remember correctly).
The price difference between Ultra II and Extreme III is
also relatively small.

One reson for a card becomming slow while photographing
can be that too many files reside in one folder. But the
1D Mark II creates a new folder every 100 pix right? Another
good reason could be that files were deleted from inside
the camera, which leads to defragmentation (not all images
are the same size) which can reduce writing performance quite
abit.

wxwax · April 4, 2007

Manfr3d wrote:

One reson for a card becomming slow while photographing
can be that too many files reside in one folder. But the
1D Mark II creates a new folder every 100 pix right? Another
good reason could be that files were deleted from inside
the camera, which leads to defragmentation (not all images
are the same size) which can reduce writing performance quite
abit.

No, it's all one folder. No files deleted "in camera." And I always reformat before a shoot.

I imagine you're right, too many files in one folder, tho why that should matter is beyond my knowledge.

Manfr3d · April 4, 2007

wxwax wrote:

No, it's all one folder. No files deleted "in camera." And I always reformat before a shoot.

I imagine you're right, too many files in one folder, tho why that should matter is beyond my knowledge.

Simply because the index table that stores a list of files in a folder grows longer and longer.
After time it becomes more and more time consuming for the computer/camera
to find the next free spot in the dir.

Nikolai · April 4, 2007

RiData, eh?

rutt wrote:

RiData 150x 8gb? I've been using these and they are pretty fast and pretty cheap (about $84). The climax of the ballet year is coming up and I'm sick of worrying about filling up cards and chimping during intermissions.

Are they reliable? I mean, I *never* had or heard of any issues with SanDisk, but others...

rutt · April 4, 2007

Nikolai wrote:

Are they reliable? I mean, I *never* had or heard of any issues with SanDisk, but others...

I've had no issues. Probably made on the same fab, eh?

ziggy53 · April 4, 2007

rutt wrote:

I've had no issues. Probably made on the same fab, eh?

Unfortunately, there is considerable difference between CF/SD card technologies. A lot of the difference is in the controller itself.

While there is no hard data (that I've found) on reliability, there is pretty good data on speeds comparing cards and cameras:

Canon 5D:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-8198

Canon 1D MKIIN:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-8200

Nikon D2Xs:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-8479
(This is one fast machine.)

wxwax · April 4, 2007

It's interesting that the Sandisk Extreme III 4 and 8GB both have the same write speed in a 1DmkIII.

HarveyMushman · April 4, 2007

wxwax wrote:

I have a 16GB in the mail, be interesting to see how slow it is.

What on earth do you do with a card that big, especially when you already have countless GB's of memory? Seriously.

It would take me a long time to fill that card, even shooting RAW. Lessee . . . my 4GB card is good for ~760 RAW files from my D70, which means I'd get well over 3k files on your new card.

wxwax · April 4, 2007

HarveyMushman wrote:

What on earth do you do with a card that big, especially when you already have countless GB's of memory? Seriously.

It would take me a long time to fill that card, even shooting RAW. Lessee . . . my 4GB card is good for ~760 RAW files from my D70, which means I'd get well over 3k files on your new card.

I almost filled-up a 12GB card on Saturday. Shooting sports in bursts with a 1DmkII in RAW. Both the mkIII and the 5D make larger files. :cool

I can safely predict one thing: camera files will not be getting smaller over time. And constantly changing cards is a pain in the butt.

Solution? Larger card.

Jeffro · April 4, 2007

wxwax wrote:

I almost filled-up a 12GB card on Saturday. Shooting sports in bursts with a 1DmkII in RAW. Both the mkIII and the 5D make larger files. :cool

I can safely predict one thing: camera files will not be getting smaller over time. And constantly changing cards is a pain in the butt.

Solution? Larger card.

Remember changing film, every 36 frames? We sure have grown impatient....:D

I still prefer 2GB cards in my 20D....less will be lost should a card fail, and changing cards after a few hundred shots isn't all that big a concern for me.

wxwax · April 5, 2007

Jeffro wrote:

Remember changing film, every 36 frames? We sure have grown impatient....:D

I still prefer 2GB cards in my 20D....less will be lost should a card fail, and changing cards after a few hundred shots isn't all that big a concern for me.

I hear you. But I've had very little card failure, just twice with Lexar, and once was because I deleted images in camera... to save space! (never again!)

I remember when a 1GB card seemed big. Now they're too small to use, except in an emergency. I imagine that's how a 4GB card will seem in a few years.

rutt · April 5, 2007

Thanks, Ziggy! Exactly what I was looking for. That RiData card looks darn good given that it's less than 1/2 the price of the ever so slightly faster cards. So I think I'll just get enough of them to solve my ballet shoot problems. Wish there were a 16gb version, though.

HarveyMushman · April 5, 2007

wxwax wrote:

I remember when a 1GB card seemed big. Now they're too small to use, except in an emergency.

Need to make room in your bag for your new cards?

urbanaries · April 7, 2007

wxwax wrote:

I almost filled-up a 12GB card on Saturday. Shooting sports in bursts with a 1DmkII in RAW. Both the mkIII and the 5D make larger files. :cool

I can safely predict one thing: camera files will not be getting smaller over time. And constantly changing cards is a pain in the butt.

Solution? Larger card.

I agree. After a year of having 1GB cards only, I found a 12GB Sandisk Extreme III for $129 locally. Paid $89 for the same card in 1GB 18 months ago. Shot a wedding over the weekend and it sure was nice not to have to juggle/stress over potential misplaced cards, and not have to think twice about shooting 1000+ pictures in RAW, including burst RAW shots of "the kiss". Nice.

Makes uploading a lot easier too....

wxwax · April 7, 2007

HarveyMushman wrote:

Need to make room in your bag for your new cards?

Maybe so.

wxwax · April 7, 2007

So I paid more attention today.

The first third of the 12GB card filled up normally, nice and fast. But by the time I passed the half-full mark, it had noticeably slowed down.

Nikolai · April 7, 2007

Sid,

wxwax wrote:

So I paid more attention today.

The first third of the 12GB card filled up normally, nice and fast. But by the time I passed the half-full mark, it had noticeably slowed down.

So, basically, 3-4Gb are still OK, but at 6Gb things are getting slow...

I think I'm gonna wait until the end of summer or so (i.e. until I actually get 1DIII and will need more/faster cards

:-).

ian408 · April 7, 2007

wxwax wrote:

So I paid more attention today.

The first third of the 12GB card filled up normally, nice and fast. But by the time I passed the half-full mark, it had noticeably slowed down.

Yep. FAT filling up...

wxwax · April 8, 2007

Nikolai wrote:

So, basically, 3-4Gb are still OK, but at 6Gb things are getting slow...

I think I'm gonna wait until the end of summer or so (i.e. until I actually get 1DIII and will need more/faster cards :-).

That sounds about right, Nik.

Nikolai · April 8, 2007

Sid,

wxwax wrote:

That sounds about right, Nik.

Do you format your CF before each use, or do you simply delete the old files?

wxwax · April 8, 2007

Nikolai wrote:

Do you format your CF before each use, or do you simply delete the old files?

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=521748&postcount=6

Nikolai · April 8, 2007

wxwax wrote:

I imagine you're right, too many files in one folder, tho why that should matter is beyond my knowledge.

It's rather simple actually. FAT is a very basic cataloguing system. In a nutshell, it has a list of files (logical units) and a list of clusters (physical units), and the one-to-many association between the two (one file can take several clusters, not necessarily a contigous set at that, hence fragmentation issue). Once those lists become large enough, every I/O operation slows down to a crawl, since it needs to go through the huge lists to find out what's availalble and what not. The actual computers can workaround this problem by using "dsik cache", but it looks like the dlsr's processors are not that advanced yet...

HTH

fastest biggest cf cards?

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