Sandisk Extreme III slower than old cards

olv

olv

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I was in need of a new CF card so I bought a Sandisk Extreme III 4gb from play.com for £18, bargain!

Anyway, it just arrived this morning and I was doing some tests to see how much faster it was than my existing cards, both are 1gb, one is a Corsair and one is a Kingston 50x. Turns out the Sandisk was actually significantly slower :thinking:

I used my Canon 10D for the test which is very very slow anyway. I shot continuous until the buffer was full (not difficult, only 9 RAW images), and then timed how long it took for the camera to stop writing to the card.

corsair 47 secs
kingston 47 secs
sandisk 1 min 01 secs

I'm puzzled as to why the sandisk is slowest. I wouldn't have thought that card capacity played much part in write speeds. I'm pretty sure it's a genuine card aswell, came in all the correct packaging and has the little zip up case and recovery software disk, plus it didn't come from ebay.

Any thoughts?
 
i have no idea....but surely the card capacity must have s/omething to do with it?
 
I thought the same when i got my 2x 2gb cards of play.com and they dont seem faster than my bog standard kingston cards of the same size.
 
Using a card reader/writer to transfer a good wadge of files, I found a 2GB Extreme III SD slightly faster than a 4GB Extreme III and a Kingston 133x. A play.com own-brand had a third of the speed.

Doesn't make a big difference to me in-camera, as I don't shoot bursts, but it can waste minutes of your life waiting for the transfer to your pooter.
 
Just did a quick test using my card reader and a 500mb ISO file.

Sandisk

Write - 41 seconds
Read - 21 seconds

Kingston

Write - 1 min 21 seconds
Read - 59 seconds

So it is a lot faster, just not in my camera. I need an upgrade!
 
olv said:
So it is a lot faster, just not in my camera. I need an upgrade!
Click to expand...

Thats the best ever excuse I have heard for wanting an upgrade :thumbs:
£18 for a card £xxxx for new kit .....................Priceless :D
 
Cobra said:
Thats the best ever excuse I have heard for wanting an upgrade :thumbs:
£18 for a card £xxxx for new kit .....................Priceless :D
Click to expand...

I working on the same principal to get my EF800L....think how much time I'll save not walking forwards with the 400L dearest.

It's not working yet so I might have to factor in the shoe leather cost to bring her round to the idea.

Bob
 
dont forget the cleaning of your trousers as you get bogged down jsut after its rained!
 
Cobra said:

Thats the best ever excuse I have heard for wanting an upgrade :thumbs:
£18 for a card £xxxx for new kit .....................Priceless :D
Click to expand...

haha i did realise how that sounded afterwards. Truth is though, the main reason I want to ugrade my 10D is for speed reasons. It takes ages to turn on, the buffer is small and slow, frame rate is too slow, auto-focus performance is slow and lacks accuracy sometimes. Combined with pretty questionable high ISO performance results in me really wanting to upgrade.

Now, where's that 5D II then...
 
try formatting the card
it's just possible it's fragmented
 
It was formatted several times before I used it :)
 
Tried a test with a Sandisk Extreme III (older version) and a Transcend 133x

On my 30D the buffer fills up after 13 shots, the Sandisk takes ~10sec to clear, the Transcend takes ~16sec. The transcend is significantly cheaper but significantly slower to clear the buffer. Of course this is only a problem if you do a lot of buffer filling.
 
is that raw or jpeg? 10 seconds though?! I'm jealous :(
 
Similar test to the one olv did on the Transcend using a 500mb file, write 1min25sec read 45sec.
 
Photon, 616 is the number of the beast, not 666, so you're past the bad bit already :)
 
to the OP
your problem may be that the camera does not work well with a 4Gb card as it will be using Fat not fat32 as with modern cameras. I have a canon 1d mk1 (along with some other cameras) and this camera will not work correctly with cards larger then 2Gb - i would suspect that the 10d would be the same.

a work around it to format the card on the pc as fat - not fat32 - you may also need to partition it as 2Gb.

when sandisk first brought the 4Gb disks out they sold them with a little 3 way switch allowing you to write to one 2G partiton or the other and also to the whole 4Gb if your camera could read fat32. The switch was not very reliable - i know as i had one of them cards and sent it back, as the switch failed.
 
rubbish! another reason to upgrade...

I'll go and dig behind the sofa, see if i can find a few quid.
 
should have clarified, that was more tongue in cheek than anything :)

I won't be upgrading my camera because this memory card won't work. If i'm honest it's extremely rare that I find myself needing more than the 2x 1gb cards that i already have so it's not an issue.
 
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