glogower Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 Shooting with my 20D, I recently purchase a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III memory card and it is so sloooooow. Could it be a counterfit card? This is the same brand that I have in a 2GB card, however my 2GB card writes much faster than the 4? Is this normal for a larger card or could it be some sort of knock off that I purchased? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 Where did you buy it? Please don't say Ebay.... Larger cards are no slower. Extreme III is Extreme III and is very fast. Your shooting speed with a 20D should be limited by the cameras ability to write fast when using an Extreme III card, not by the speed of the card. Since card speed in a 20D isn't an issue unless you are shooting very long bursts of images and filling the camera buffer, what makes you think this card is slow? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
will king Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 If you gto it from ebay that chances are it's a fake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eric friedemann Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 As an aside, Calumet and other stores are blowing out Extreme III's, apparently to make room for Extreme IV's: http://www.calumetphoto.com/ctl?ac.ui.pn=search.Search&query=extreme+III See also B&H Photo and Adorama. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kance Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 See this link to see if you possibly have a fake card. Good luck. <p> http://reviews.ebay.com/FAKE-SanDisk-Extreme-Compact-Flash-Cards- Exposed_W0QQugidZ10000000001456539 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
henry_ed_fly Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 You can call Sandisk and they can tell you if it is a fake. Should be a serial number on the card that Sandisk can look up for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanthree Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 If you bought it from a vendor named model-8 on ebay, it's fake. Mine was. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lester_wareham Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 I just got a couple of 4Gb extreem IIIs also, in use they seem just as fast as the 2Gb EIII I was using before, this is on a 20D. Measurements (I forget the site name) show they are very slightly slower than a 2Gb but it is just a few percent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luke_tyssowski1 Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 I just noticed an Ultra II I got off Ebay is fake. :( I never even checked it until I read this thread. It won't work at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 I'd still like to know why the card seems slow. The card speed doesn't affect the shooting rate of the 20D unless you fill the buffer. Is the playback noticably slow, or is the transfer speed to a PC noticably slow? I'm using a bunch of cards from 133x Lexars to 12x generic cards and when I'm shooting I can't tell which one I'm using unless I take it out of the camera and look at it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kelly_flanigan1 Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 One can do a transfer rate test of the card; like its a hard drive using a GOOD reader and your cards. With SD cards off of Ebay I have bought some hawked as being fast actually test as fast; others I have bought seem to have just cool looking labels with fast; XXX speed printed on them. An actual fast card can also "back down" to as lower media rate transfer speed if a camera/devices software to card have some squables too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kelly_flanigan1 Posted March 24, 2007 Share Posted March 24, 2007 An unknown card can be tested as a logical drive with a known decent reader. One tests the megabytes per second transfered with a test program. You want to use a USB 2 port or a firewire port for the reader. A USB 1 hub; a USB 1 reader; a USB 1 port will drop the read/write transfer rate down to say 0.8 megs per second; even if its a fast card. The test hardware should be so one is testing the bottleneck; slowpokeness of the card tested; not your settup's bottlenecks. Thus with SD cards here I just test the Ebay cards to figure which are real and which ones I have are fakes. Most cameras have internal memory as a buffer. If your card is slow one can "run out of buffer room" during a fast shooting of many frames; or when shooting higher end video. Here the buffer fills up while one the slow poke card is writing. With video this results in as stoppage, lockup or frames lost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glogower Posted March 24, 2007 Author Share Posted March 24, 2007 This counterfit crap absolutely sucks and pisses me off. The buffer fills up after only 3 or 4 shots on this crap card. I think my ebay days are over. Ebay will do nothing about this stuff being misrepresented and sold as the real deal. What a scam. This can't be legal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glogower Posted March 24, 2007 Author Share Posted March 24, 2007 This was the ebay seller...jaylyn712 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chinoloco93 Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 Andy, Using this link to review negative feedback, your seller has been accused of selling fake cards before: http://www.toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs Good luck and I hope you can recover your money. Like Bob says here many times, you get what yo upay for and I always buy from trusted sellers. Not worth the deal in my opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 The buffer on the 20D is good for about 20 JPEGs or 6 RAW images. That shouldn't really be greatly affected by card speed. I assume you must be shooting RAW if the buffer fills after only 3 or 4 images. Ebay is well known to be full of counterfeit memory cards. It's been reported here at least a dozen times. Most of the memory cards being sold in bulk on Ebay by individuals or overseas dealers are, in fact, fakes. See the warning on my website for example: http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/compact_flash_memory_cards.html#ebay_warning You might also find this link useful - http://reviews.ebay.com.au/FAKE-SanDisk-Extreme-Compact-Flash-Cards-Exposed_W0QQugidZ10000000001449653 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
delwyn_ching Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 Sorry to hear that but yes, there's been a bunch of posts here and elsewhere regarding fake CF (and others such as SD, Memory Stick, etc.) cards being sold on Ebay. I usually get mine from B&H Photo, Costco or www.flashmemorystore.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
petebowman Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 I have a 4Gb Ultra II purchased from a reputable company in the UK (picstop), and have found it slower than an older Lexar 66x 1Gb card. Not in terms of transfer speeds to the PC, which are very fast, but more in terms of what seems to be allocation table writes. Telling my 350D to delete all files takes an age - it takes about half a second to delete each file. I never had such a problem with the Lexar card, which would delete about 10 files per secon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emre Posted March 25, 2007 Share Posted March 25, 2007 I wonder if that is because the 4GB has a larger file allocation table? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lester_wareham Posted March 26, 2007 Share Posted March 26, 2007 Agreed, file deletion requires a rewrite of the FAT which will be slower for a larger card, format is just as fast I have found. What matters is the write speed of JPEG or RAW data. Check out the CF performance database http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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