Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Cameras, Lenses and Shooting gear => Topic started by: Ed Jack on March 26, 2009, 05:27:26 pm

Title: Want the fastest CF card - comprehensive review
Post by: Ed Jack on March 26, 2009, 05:27:26 pm

Hi Folks, heads up on a non-photo orientated but precise Cf card review for your high end Digital backs or high frame rate D-SLRs:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/compactflash...view-31541.html (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/compactflash-card-memory,review-31541.html)

Enjoy

Ed

Title: Want the fastest CF card - comprehensive review
Post by: sydlow on March 27, 2009, 10:33:05 am

Note these results are not consistent with Rob Galbraith's tests with specific cameras. For example, on a Nikon D3, the Kingston cards are well down the list:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_mu...p?cid=6007-9255 (http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9255)

Title: Want the fastest CF card - comprehensive review
Post by: dalethorn on March 27, 2009, 12:57:48 pm

One problem is that performance can degrade suddenly after data has been written to the card, per the discussions of SSD Drives. I've had CF cards that would write at 6 mb/second the first day, then eventually drop to about 250 kb/second using WinXP, even when several GB free space is available. Those were SanDisk cards.

Title: Want the fastest CF card - comprehensive review
Post by: Mosccol on March 28, 2009, 09:25:14 am

What I get from both is that SanDisk and Lexar pro are both consistently in the high reaches of the list...

Title: Want the fastest CF card - comprehensive review
Post by: fike on March 28, 2009, 03:11:56 pm

I recently got a 50D with UDMA support for CF cards, so I have been through this recently.  I go the Sandisk Extreme IV, UDMA.  There is an Extreme IV that doesn't support UDMA, so watch out for that.

I have a few observations about the process of getting the most from your flash cards.

1) you may need to replace your card readers to support the new UDMA protocols.  Without a UDMA reader, you will be limited to something in the low 15MB per second range.  This one (http://store.compuapps.com/omusb20unrew.html) is cheap, small and very good.

2) I have a cheap USB expansion card in my PC. It was a bottleneck with my UDMA cards.  I needed to plug into the USB port on the motherboard.

3) I have a RAID 1 system (redundancy) and its write speed is slower than the CF card reader, so I don't get the full benefit of the speed.

4) My old PC Card CF adapter, when coupled with my UDMA card, crashes my Vista laptop.