CF Card Reliability

[dmanthree]

I know there are measureable differences in speed between higher

priced and lower priced CF cards, such as the base line Sandisk and

Extreme III, but its there a difference in reliability? If you don't

need the speed, or the Extreme III's ability to shoot at low temps,

is there any reason to pay the higher price?

[phoneguy]

Extreme III comes with image recovery software. It would be worth getting one just for that.

 

Mike

[ci_p]

I've just (today) bought an Extreme CF card which came with Rescue Pro 3.0 on a mini CD. I was not very impressed.

 

It asked for a licence code which is unecessary agro.

The interface is bad. Too many big icons and dumb startup wizard.

It does not have a function to test the media.

Constant nagging about language.

 

I'm afraid it got uninstalled inside 3 minutes. ImageRescue 2 which came with a Lexar card is much better.

 

The good thing is that it will run off the CD.

[Nicholas Barry]

Flash memory is manufactured by just a handful of companies which is then built into many different brands. Reliability is pretty consistent across the board from all accounts that I've read and from my own experience. You can always buy recovery software from several different sources. I just bought 2 1GB CF cards from Kingston for ~US$38 each. Cheaper than Sandisk and Lexar and probably the same flash mem inside.

 

I say save your money.

[Nicholas Barry]

And right now Newegg has a deal where you can get the same card for US$29 with a $9 rebate. Of course, that's if Kingston doesn't find a way to deny your rebate for some fine-print reason.

 

The cheapest Sandisk is $43.

[dmanthree]

Thanks, all for the replies. Frankly, I can't find any reliable data on the true failure rates of any flash cards, and no comparison data between different grades, let alone brands. And the cost differential between an Extreme III card and a base level card is significant. Yes, the expensive cards are faster, but if you don't need the speed, why waste the money?

[ci_p]

If you use a card and it works consistently withput problems, then I think you'd consider that reliable. Faliure figures are not going to be that useful if you have a card compatibility problem with your specific model of camera.

 

"if you don't need the speed, why waste the money"

 

That's true. A 1Ds2 writes a 20MB RAW file, and a slow CF card might write at 1MB/s, taking 20secs to write a photo. 3 photos a minute (with a 10 shot buffer) may be a bit limiting. JPEG with a 20D might be a different story.

[Ed_Ingold]

I doubt that temperature has a profound effect on operation of any memory card (other than a micro-disk). Sandisk is vague on this point. They merely say that the Extreme card was TESTED to -13 deg F (which is not all that cold), and make no mention of a tested temperature range for the Ultra II. The real selling point is the alleged 20 mb/sec transfer rate vs 10 mb/sec for the lowly Ultra II card. Even this has much more effect on downloading than in the camera.

 

The batteries of your camera will definitely have less voltage and capacity at low temperatures.

[ShunCheung]

I have been shooting digital for about 4 years and none of my CF cards has ever failed. I have read about a few cases in photo.net, but apparently they are quite rare.

 

I also know of a few cases where people accidentally left CF cards in their pockets, and they go through the washer and dryer cycles without any damage.

[jason_vieitas]

Hmm, though I do agree with you guys on many points I just want to say, at Walmart we sold "no name cards" well impact. We had many returned for a myrid of reasons. I myself bought one, for a back up, and had to return it because the card kept asking to format again and again, so I would stick to some name brands. Just from my experiance.

[dmanthree]

Shun,

 

Just curious; what brand do you use?

[ShunCheung]

When I bought my Nikon D100 back in the summer of 2004, I got one "no name" 256K CF card, one lowest-grade 256K Sandisk and then a 512K Viking. The following year I added a 1G Viking. From 2004 on, I have been using all Lexar and Sandisk now, mostly 2G's and recently I added a 4G Sandisk Extreme III when the price was cut in half about a month ago.

 

Last year I added a 12MP DSLR and also stopped shooting film, so my memory space usage has gone way up.

 

Given the current low prices, I would stick with the two name brands. I have had maybe 10 CF cards in total and my wife has a few SD (also Lexar and Sandisk) and some Sony memory sticks since the late 1990's. It is not exactly a large sample size such that you should take this with a small grain of salt, but none of them has ever gone bad.