EOS 30D very slow with big CF Cards. Normal?

[pablomatsumoto]

<p>Hi. I am writing because I am having an annoying problem and I don't know if it is normal or not. I've recently bought a Kingston 8GB 133X Elite Pro CF and I find it extremely slow in comparison with my other 2GB Cards (Also Elite Pro, same model, and Sandisk Ultra II, very similar).<br>

For example, when I press the PLAY button it lags a couple of seconds to show the picture. Also, the other day the card was 80% capacity and suddently my camera busting cache become near 0.. I had to wait for 3/4 seconds to be able to shot again.. Then I shot one picture and again have to wait.<br>

This issues makes me discard the card, as it makes it useless for social photography, which I do.</p>

<p>Have you experience this issues? Is normal or the card may be deffective?</p>

[PuppyDigs]

<p>I owned a 5D of similar vintage as the 30D and used 8GB SanDisk Extreme III cards. No diff in display or shooting from similar 2 and 4 GB cards. Well, formatting was a lot slower but that was it. I'm guessing your card either needs deep formating due to a hosed directory or is just plain hosed.</p>

[bob_osullivan]

<p>Do you format the card before each use or just delete photos? You should format before each use. Also, do you use it in multiple cameras without formatting?</p>

<p>The larger card should only be slower if directory structure is a mess or if the data is fragmented. Both happen from not enough formatting. </p>

<p>Try deep formatting on a computer, then reformat in the camera and get used to formatting everytime.</p>

[davidhay]

<p>It's the card. I bought a cheap 4GB 133x card and was suprised how slow it was, even slower than my standard cards. Your Kingston card is also sold by 7dayshop which posts reader feedback. One buyer found it even slower than his standard speed Sandisk card. The Kinston took 12.5 seconds to clear a 10 shot buffer compared to 8.7 seconds for the standard blue Sandisk.</p>

[roger krueger]

Even with good cards FAT32 (>2gb) is slower than FAT16 (<=2gb)

<br><br>

Even with good cards, older Canons (and maybe newer ones, dunno) start slowing down considerably in folders with much

more than a couple hundred images. So keep starting new folders, it only takes a moment and is pretty trivial to clean up at

upload time.

<br><br>

On my 1dsII an empty Kingston 8gb is about as fast as a decent 4gb, but slows dramatically in the last gb or two of

capacity. My guess is that they use some sort of parallel write strategy to get the speed rating with cheap slow memory, and

it stops being efficient near full. (Also a known issue with a lot of cheap solid-state faux hard drives.)