UDMA 7 CF card in 50D

I have a strange issue which neither Canon or SanDisk customer support can explain or help me with. I work on a Windows 10 Pro machine. I just yesterday purchased a 32GB SanDisk Extreme UDMA 7 Enabled CF card. I shot several RAW & JPEG photos and connected my camera to my computer with a USB cable and opened File Explorer. When viewing the files on the card NO CR2 files were present, only JPEG files. There were indeed other files which should have been the CR2 files, but Windows showed them as 0 byte files, without a name or file extension. These "0 byte" files can not be moved or copied. If I place the card in a card reader the CR2 files are present as they should be. I can connect the camera to a Windows 7 machine with a USB cable and Windows Explorer sees the CR2 files properly. Has anyone else noticed such behavior with a UDMA 7 card and Windows 10? Oh, and I do have the latest 1.0.9 firmware installed. The screenshot shows what should be IMG_0190.CR2. I use FastStone as my default JPG viewer, hence the "FastStone JPG File".

Edited October 30, 2018 by michael_lee|3

The 50D predates W10, so, not a surprise that random oddball issues like this would occur - nor a surprise that tech support wouldn't be able to help you in the slightest.

 

I assume that with other cards you are able to access your RAWs - on your 50D -... Because my first guess is that W10 doesn't have the right RAW Codec for the 50D, my second guess would be that the 50D is acting as goalkeeper (for some reason?), my 3rd is that the UDMA7 mode is triggering some weird error. That said, the highest I write speeds I ever saw w/ a 50D was ~45MB/s. Faster UDMA7 cards never really added much to the top end IME.

 

Such inconsistencies are not too surprising though, perhaps a certain type of memory controller interfacing with the camera's controller is causing it, maybe something else... frankly, there's no real way to know for certain. Luckily this problem is easily avoided. Simply remove the card, and use a CF card reader. The good news is that transfer speeds will be vastly faster - even w/ a USB 2.0 reader, I found a CF card reader to be about 2-3+ times as fast as downloading through the 50D. Naturally, I didn't exhaustively test, but with a USB3 CF card reader, I would expect transfer speeds probably up to 30+x the speed of downloading through the camera- though it depends on the max sustained read speed of the card.

 

The first time I did a file transfer through the camera was the last time I did a file transfer through the camera.

Marcus - Yes, with non-UDMA 7 cards Windows 10 sees the RAWs via USB from the camera. While I've always just had to carry along a USB cable to transfer files wherever I am, it looks like I'll have to also carry a card reader from now on. This was the first UDMA 7 card I ever purchased, and this is strange behavior for sure, but nothing surprises me much any more with Windows 10.

Thanks for your input and suggestion.

I wonder if running the EOS utility in Windows 7 compatibilty mode would be a work around?

Mark - I hadn't thought of trying that. Indeed, when I had attempted to use EOS Utility it would hang, and then not completely transfer all the RAW files on the card. File Explorer is absolutely consistent, in that it does not recognize the CR2 files (as shown in that screenshot). I'm thinking more and more that it is a 50D and Windows 10 UDMA 7 compatibility thing, and not something that can be fixed (as far as a direct USB connection is concerned). Thanks.