Memory card confusion (D300s)

BunnyPics

BunnyPics

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Hi all. I have just bought Nikon D300s which takes one of each SD and CF memory cards. I am rubbish with hardware and techie stuff and I'm utterly confused as to which CF card to get and whether I would be OK with my current existing SD or need a faster one. I know there's no point in getting cards which write faster than your camera can write on them, but I can't find any information anywhere about how fast D300s can write. I'm looking through the camera's instruction manual now, but still can't see anything about which cards to get. I do plan to use the high-speed burst sometimes.

I have a couple of SanDisk Ultra SDHC cards which have class 6 logo on them and "30MB/s". Are these OK or should be faster?
I also need a CF card and wonder which card / class / speed to get if there's such thing.

I will be grateful for any good advice before I throw my money on speeds my camera's not capable of.
 
your post made me curious so I just dug out my D300 and 3 memory cards.
A very crude test by putting the camera on continuous high and firing of a burst for 5 seconds (enough to saturate the buffer), then measure how long it takes to write the buffer to the card (ie until the card light goes out)
Dane Elect 8GB "High Speed" 133x (about 20MB/s I guess). 32 seconds
Kingston 16GB Ultimate (45MB/sec. read and 40MB/sec. write). 20 seconds
Lexar 16GB Professional 1066x (about 90-100MB/Sec I think). 17 to 18 seconds

I also noticed that the Kingston and the Lexar would run at approx 1 frame per second when the buffer was full, the Dane Elec could not hold a constant frame rate and varied between about 0.75 to 0.25 frames a second.
So yes, a faster card makes a difference and, if the D300s is the same as the D300, I would do the same test. Does your 30MB/s card hold a constant frame rate when the buffer is full? If it does, then you probably will not get a dramatic improvement from a faster card.
Between the faster cards (assuming you need one), if you are sticking with SD cards I'd just get a nice fast one as they aren't that expensive anyway.
I have a couple of these for me D7100 and they are very fast for the money....
http://www.mymemory.co.uk/SDHC/Kingston/Kingston-32GB-SD-Card-(SDHC)-UHS-I-U3-HD-Video-4k---90MB_s
 
Yardbent said:
hope a link is OK

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3759735
Click to expand...

some interesting stuff in that link. So apparently the D300s has a max write speed of 30MB/s. Which, on the face of it, would say I should not have seen any difference between the 40 and 90MB/s cards. But I did. The key point (stated in that in that link) is that there is a big difference between the headline (burst) figure and the sustained speed which is more important.

None of this really matters much though unless you use the "spray and pray" approach to taking photos ;)
 
Thank you everyone. I just bought a cf card, probably faster than I need... Will stick with the sd's I have at the moment and do my own tests. Will keep you posted.
 
Worth remembering you can run with just your SDs and don't need a CF unless you want the features of a 2 card set up.
 
Just to update everyone on this and let you know what my experience has been so far.

I bought Sandisk Extreme 120MB/S UDMA 7 (whatever that means) card. I read the articles and links about them but my attention threshold for tedious technicalities relating to different speeds and standards is so low, I just went and bought that card and considered the matter forgotten. Until it arrived, and then I needed to try it all out, that is...

The tests that I conducted were very simple. The normal shooting mode (single shot - refocus - another shot and so on), worked very well on the normal setup (CF - main, SD - backup copy of everything). With this setup, when importing to the computer, all I needed to do was to stick my SD card into it and i liked that idea because it already has the SD slot, because I know people who bent the CF card slot pins in their Nikons by phaffing around with taking their CF card out and putting it back in again, and because I don't have and don't want to buy a CF adaptor (it's another thing and I lose things a lot).

The high speed burst, which is another shooting mode that I would be using, was a different matter. The above card setup worked OK at shooting (probably because there's buffer on camera where it goes first, I guess), but the writing (when the green "card in use" light stays on) took a good minute, I swear! This was the time I would be having an urge to take another photo burst, but I had to resort to tea making activities because the buffer was taken up and emptying very, v-e-r-y slowly. When I changed the card setup to overflow (CF - main, SD - overflow), this write process still took place, and the light stayed on, but it lasted about a second and a half.

So I went ahead and created myself my first two custom shooting modes :-) One - "Rabbit HQ Portrait" - has 14 but RAW image quality and the backup card setup, the other one - "Rabbit burst" - has 12 bit quality and the overflow card setup. (Nikon D300s cannot do high speed burst in 14 bit, but up until the point I acquired the camera, I used 12 but for many years and still I couldn't see a difference between the two colour settings... Maybe I need an IPS monitor for that, but that's a topic for another thread.) I use both modes regularly and so far everything suits me. Except that when I have to import my bursts I have to do this via a USB cable connection from camera to PC, but I do my bursts rarely and sparingly, so all suits me well so far.

I know I could upgrade the SD card, but on my quick and sparse reading about these various cards, I caught a glimpse somewhere of the assertion that they're still not as fast as CF's anyway and I saw some fast ones and they cost heaps of money and apparently they're not as good anyway... And even if they're pretty fast, I figure there's still going to be at least two-fold increase in the writing lag as I don't believe the buffer will write to both cards at once... or will it? I might try it out one day with someone else's fast SD, but for now, I have it kinda figured and it kinda works.
 
I really would not worry about bending pins on the cf. I know it happens but have never worked out how people can be so cack handed.
I can't help with the problem though, other than to suggest you get a fast SD card - the one I liked to above is not that expensive.
 
brman said:
I really would not worry about bending pins on the cf. I know it happens but have never worked out how people can be so cack handed.
I can't help with the problem though, other than to suggest you get a fast SD card - the one I liked to above is not that expensive.
Click to expand...
My dad bent one! And then he went in with the tweezers to straighten it and that broke it off :LOL: So it fell into his D700 and it took him ages to rattle it out. It fell out in the end. But the CF card works as normal. He since read somewhere that each pin is a terminal for some particular functionality or something, so he obviously broke one he didn't use.

I'll check the SD card. Thank you!
 
BunnyPics said:
My dad bent one! And then he went in with the tweezers to straighten it and that broke it off :LOL: So it fell into his D700 and it took him ages to rattle it out. It fell out in the end. But the CF card works as normal. He since read somewhere that each pin is a terminal for some particular functionality or something, so he obviously broke one he didn't use.

I'll check the SD card. Thank you!
Click to expand...

oh dear, just don't tell him I called him cack handed then! ;)
 
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