Which D3 dual slot mode will you use?

[mark_esposito]

I wonder what everyone's thoughts are on how they will use the D3's dual card

slots. The options seem to be:

 

1. Consecutive recording (Card 1 until full, and then Card 2)

 

2. Simultaneous recording (Card 2 mirror's Card 1 for redundancy) (fps?)

 

3. Separate recording (RAW on Card 1 and JPG on Card 2)

 

 

If you assume that CF cards are 100% reliable, (I don't have stats) then option

1 seems convenient. If you don't, option 2 may save the day for something like

a wedding or an event where a card goes bad.

 

I assume that Option 3 is meant for those that need to hand over a disk very

quickly, (sports) but I'm not sure. To me the option 2 failsafe would always be

more valuable than something as trivial as option 3.

 

Thoughts?

 

Mark

[ilkka_nissila]

Well if you use option 2 then you need twice the card space available. Adds a bit to the cost of a quite expensive camera.

 

Still that is what I would do if I were shooting a wedding professionally and if I had experienced a card failure before. I haven't, so I wouldn't.

[ShunCheung]

If I shot weddings with the D3 professionally, I would get two 16G CF cards (or perhaps 32G if those are available in the future) and write each RAW file into both cards. Most likely I wouldn't even need to worry about changing memory cards the entire day.

 

In 5 years of shooting DSLRs, I have never had a memory card failure, but that can happen occasionally.

[mark_esposito]

Shun - You make a great point, even if it wasn't the point you were making. :^}

 

Some were hesitant to use the largest cards, since in the event of failure, they would lose the whole thing/event. Using your 16MB on each side idea, that would no longer be an issue. Brilliant!

[waltflanagan]

I've had 1 partial card failure in 3 years of using a DSLR. I lost about 30 images out of 150 on the card. I reformatted but it had real bad blocks so I tossed the card.

 

I wish you could alternate the RAW/JPEG writing like:

 

frame 1 RAW to card 1, JPEG to card 2

frame 2 RAW to card 2, JPEG to card 1

 

Then they would fill up at about the same time.

 

Also if there are dual writing systems you could interleave writes and clear the buffer faster.

[mark_esposito]

Amazon has the 16GB Extreme III for $235, and the 8GB Extreme IV for $155, so the cost is not that bad. Two 16GB cards could work for the life of the camera.

[bjørn rørslett]

I will normally use the "mirror" option and let the camera write RAW files to both cards.

 

CF-cards do occasionally fail, so I experience about one bad failure per year. You can be certain that if a card fails, it will do so at the most awkward of moments. In this respect they behave identical to computer hard disks, and there is a reason why I run all my computers [except laptops] with mirrored disk systems. It's just a logical extension to this practice to run my D3 cameras in RAID-1 mode :)

[aeiffel]

I'll probably use the fallback mode for casual stuffs and the mirrored mode for important ones. But I have yet to see how the mirror option will affect the max shooting speed and number of consecutive pics filling the buffer ?

[mark_esposito]

Bjorn - exactly what I was thinking. The dual slots seem like a gift to me in this regard. As much as it might be rare, we'll be praising Nikon the day our psuedo-RAID drive comes through.

[bruce_rubenstein___nyc]

I would be than a little inclined to write RAW to one card and JPG to the other. I've never had a problem with a memory card and I shot JPG for several years before switching to RAW this year. I still pay attention to WB and exposure the same way I did when shooting JPGs. If I ran into an "Aw Crap!" on the RAW's, I'd still have perfectly useable JPG files. I would probably only need a pair of 4 gig cards for all the "insurance" JPGs.

[tom_luongo1]

Bjorn, what does "bad failure" mean? You've lost all your images on a card? You've lost some images but not all? Or lost at least one image?

[bjørn rørslett]

The word "bad" usually means exactly that. For example, unreadable cards that cannot be coaxed away from oblivion with any known software (for example, try to read 8 GB cards that all of a sudden claim they are 2 TB (sic) and the critical sectors you need to change can't be altered), cards that "stamp" each image with a randomised garbage content, cards that develop bad sectors that make your camera hung so hard that you need to do a boot reset on it to make it respond to any command, and so on ad nauseam. Having a 99.9% success rate still means you do get errors and always the valuable images are the ones to get lost. I stick to Lexar cards myself after too many times having tried to help friends save files from damaged Sandisk. RiData or no-name brand cards. Yet even with the Lexars I can get burned.

[mjt]

#2 (simultaneous) for work, #3 (separate) for everything else.

 

my experience with cards? i only use SanDisk and Lexar (12 and 16 GB cards) and have never had a failure. i guess i'm the lucky one.

[kuryan_thomas]

I have no opinion - I'm just happy that you see a D3 in my future! :-)

[a._l._shaw]

I have 16 Sandisk Cards (2-16 gb, mostly 8gb) 1 lexar (4gb). The lexar failed. D2X.

 

I will ALWAYS use #2. One of the major reasons to buy the camera.

 

ALS

[chris_leck]

I'd mostly use consecutive recording. I've never had a memory card failure of any sort in four years and over 100,000 frames (using only the top Sandisk and Lexar cards).

 

Still, if on a critical assignment, I'd consider mirroring.

 

As a raw shooter, I see little need for separate recording (raw on card 1 and JPEG on card 2), although I can see where this can be useful. It can depend on ones workflow. For a while I shot raw+JPEG. Since using Lightroom, I found that he processing was fast enough that I didn't need initial JPEGs, which I was using mostly as previews on the web.

[flemming_s._christensen]

Say you were going to load an 8GB card and a 16GB card into two empty slots in your D3. Which card would go into which slot?

Cheers, Flemming

[ShunCheung]

If one can afford a $5000 D3, most likely you can afford a couple of 16G CF cards. I see little reason to use the "consecutive" mode unless you want your 2 cards to last a week-long trip without ever changing CF cards away from home. So far my practice is to download my images onto portable hard drives every evening and have multiple copies. I would like to review the images from that day, anyway.

 

I think D3 users are better off leaving the CF setting to "mirror" all the time. Otherwise, it is one more thing you can potentially forget to double check before an important shoot, such as a wedding: you might think you have mirroring but in fact you are in "consecutive" mode and of course by Murphy's Law, a card fails for the first time at the most critical moment and you have no backup.

[mark_esposito]

For those that had card failures - did the camera indicate anything to you, or did you just

keep shooting thinking everything was ok?

 

The reason I ask: If you never knew anything while shooting, we would have to be careful

to upload both cards if in a hurry. Redundancy doesn't do any good if you re-format the

card before really checking out the images. Missing 30 images out of 150 might not be

noticable at first.

 

I think the P5000 (Epson) may get real handy in this. While copying the master CF card to

the laptop, copy the second to the P5000 as the backup.

[oskar_ojala]

I'd probably use #1 or just a single card. But with card prices going they way they go, I'd probably go over to #2 sooner or later. It's not a big deal if I have some glitch in my normal shooting, but if I'm on a trip or need to do something important, then #2 is worth considering. I haven't really had card issues, but prices are dropping and my shooting volume is not going to explode, so #2 will be a cheap option anyway.

 

For pros like Bjorn, option #2 is quite obvious since it's really inexpensive in the long run.

[aeiffel]

As I said, if the mirror mode doesn't affect the max fps and time needed to empty the buffer then it is the way to go. I can imagine this mode will put some burden on the processor and maybe lead to a measurable penalty.<br/>Then we also have to see if and how the D3 will let us know when one cards gets into trouble while we shoot. In the field I'll copy to 2 Colorspaces and need to know if a card was faulty, and which one.<br/>

Some questions waiting to be answered before we can really set up our new workflow...