A while ago I ended up thinking about looking into getting a faster CF card for my 5dmkII. ; The camera is capable of writing data to the card at 30MB/s, but my current two main cards, a pair of Transcend 133x 16GB cards, can only manage about 10MB/s. ; This hasn't been as much of a limit as it may seem, the buffer in the camera is quite adequate and I don't usually shoot all that rapidly. ; But in one unusual incident I finally did hit the limits of the buffer and that started me thinking about getting something faster. I ended up trying out two cards. ; The first was an A-data 533x 16GB card. ; It's an unknown (to me) brand and I admit I was a little unsure about it, especially when I was seeing reports of it corrupting data, but it was available from a local CompUSA (formerly Tiger Direct) and if it didn't perform as advertised (80mb/s read and 50MB/s write) I could return it. ; I was kind of hoping that it'd perform though, I wanted the obscure brand to be a winner. Well.. it wasn't a winner. I'd better detail my test methods. ; Using my computer I used a program called flash memory toolkit that offers write and read speed benchmarks using a variety of file sizes. ; It's not ideal because the file sizes top off at 5MB, if I could have it going till around 20MB I'd be happier, as the sizes get bigger the performance seems to get better. ; But it's what I have available. ; In my camera I use a somewhat cruder method, I take a bunch of pictures and use a stopwatch to try to count the amount of time that elapses from when the write LED illuminates to when it turns off. ; I expect it'll have a higher error rate but it should at least get me in the ballpark. For the A-data, my card reader results were write speeds of 16MB/s and read speeds of 36MB/s. ; This was using a Lexar USB reader that's speed limited by the USB 2.0 interface, it seems to have difficulty going any faster than 40MB/s. ; The card may have been able to go faster than 36MB/s for read speeds if I had a fast enough reader, but read speeds really aren't the critical factor. ; What we're all interested in is write speeds, right? And that's where the problem was. ; In camera it showed speeds of around 10MB/s, not really any different from my budget Transcend 133x cards. The CompUSA site has three user reviews of the card. ; Two are kind of vague and unhelpful, I gather these people may not have been at all concerned about the speed. ; And one was by a user who was unhappy and reported data corruption problems. ; I've seen that elsewhere when I was reading up on this card. ; I knew it was going to be iffy but I wanted to give it a chance. Anyway, I didn't use it enough to form an opinion on the reliability. ; It's been returned because the write speeds were woefully inadequate. ; I don't know why it seemed significantly slower in camera than in my card reader, there's always variations between different system setups, maybe this card is strangely particular about where it performs best. But for the record, it was $55 from CompUSA for me. Next up we have the Transcend 400x 16GB card. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002WE2PW8/ref=s9_simh_gw_p23_i4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0Q1E2BPXZPXECFRCPFYQ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846 $59 from Amazon. Transcend may be another no name brand to some of you, it was when I got my first 16GB card (I was going off on a canoeing trip for a week and had no way to offload the pics, so I wanted a big and cheap card). ; But it seems to be well liked among some circles, and at Rob Galbraith (my go to source for flash card ratings, although they're kinda of falling behind on some of the newer card models that have been introduced) the Transcend 300X was one of their faster scoring cards when used in the 5dmkII. ; The 400x wasn't tested in that camera. ; Actually it wasn't used in any of the camera tests from what I can see, just in their card reader benchmarks. My Transcend 133x cards have been good to me. ; They read at like 30MB/s so they're reasonably fast to offload (about as fast as my external USB hard drives) and they've been fairly reliable. ; I had one weird incident where I pulled a card from my card reader without going through the "to safely remove card" rigmarole. ; Logically if the card wasn't being written to it should have been fine, but something odd happened and when I put it in my camera it said it couldn't read it. ; A reformat seems to have fixed that issue. ; So take that as you will.. but I consider them fairly reliable by now. On to the performances. ; Using my USB 2.0 reader I got read speeds of 31MB/s and write speeds of 19MB/s. ; But by the time I'd gotten this card I'd added a new reader to my inventory, an expresscard reader for my laptop (also by Lexar) that uses the PCI express bus as an interface. ; It's capable of higher speeds than the USB reader. ; On my laptop using that card I got read speeds of 74MB/s and write speeds of 33MB/s. Anyone else find it strange that the USB reader seemed to throttle down the write speeds even though it seemed capable of higher throughputs than 19MB/s? ; I don't understand what's at work there. As an aside I also find it interesting that the A-data card showed faster read speeds on the USB reader. ; I can't really make anything of this.. maybe it was capable of faster read speeds overall. ; Maybe it was a weird card that would have worked best in a specific hardware environment that I didn't have.. I don't know. And now the key number, the in camera performance. ; The Transcend showed read speeds of about 30MB/s. The box claims write speeds of 60MB/s and read speeds of 90MB/s. ; It didn't get anywhere near that. ; But a reviewer on Amazon claims to have gotten a write speed of 64MB/s using a firewire reader, so maybe with higher performance gear it really is capable of going that fast. ; Or maybe he was just a manufacturer shill, I dunno. All I can really conclude is that the Transcend 400X card is capable of quite decent performance. ; The fastest cards Rob Galbraith tested in the 5dmkII was the Sandisk Extreme Ducati edition cards. ; They didn't quite manage 33MB/s for in camera write speeds. ; The comparatively bargain priced 400X transcend gets awfully close to that performance level. It's worth noting that that was at least a generation old card tech by now. ; Sandisk has completely overhauled their line, their standard Extreme card is now listed as 60MB/s and I don't think Rob Galbraith has tested that model in any cameras yet. ; I have no idea what those would do in the camera. ; My guess is that 33MB/s was looking like it was near the performance limit of the camera, I'm thinking it can't go much faster even if you gave it a card that could do 200MB/s. ; Perhaps a better card can help squeeze the last few MB/s out of the camera. But for the price I'm happy. ; The Extreme 60MB/s costs $90 and wouldn't, so far as I can tell, give me any significant extra performance. ; Rob Galbraith suggests that with my readers the Transcend might actually read faster (except with this freaky SATA reader that can manage 100MB/s read speeds off of the Extreme) in any case. Now I need to head back to the zoo. ; I can tell the wolves to give me their best shot (so to speak).. 'cause I can take it. Again.. realistically speaking I won't notice the performance gains all that much, unless I take an awful lot of shots at once. ; But I'm going to feel awfully smug walking into the zoo the next time knowing what I've got sitting in the CF slot.
