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A Memory Card Torture Test
An anonymous reader writes "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards? If you want to find out how much better a high speed memory card is, check out this group test of high capacity compact flash and SD cards."
You'd think cards developed to the same spec would have equal performance. Is that really not the case with SD or others? Interesting article.
Stiny! Get me a danish!
The Rob Galbraith DPI website has a huge database of performance with various cards and various cameras. I use this as a benchmark for deciding when I need a new CF card vs. the Camera I have, and the family of camera I'd love to upgrade too one day.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?
(These are serious questions ...)
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Hint: skip to page 18 for the conclusions.
You don't get any more professional than padding your 3 page article to 19 pages with lines like this (from the conclusion):
Yeah, you could say that. One of those things was my patience.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.
I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
If you take 10,000 photos between taking a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo and backing it up onto a tougher media, you pretty much deserve to lose all your work. The biggest loss of digital camera images are caused by loss/theft of the camera, and user error (accidental deletion). Media failure doesn't even register on the scale.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
More of a high end performance test.
There was one proper torture test done by the UK Digital Camera Shopper magazine where they dipped in cola, run through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled and then for sport hit with a sledgehammer and then nailed to a tree. They didn't survive the last two tests though...
Wonderfully resilient stuff I'd say.
Couldn't find the article freely availabe on the mag, just a ref at BBC news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3939333.stm
What blows my mind in this issue is not the memory cards, but the cameras themselves. A friend of mine just bought a new Canon camera. Sorry I don't recall the model, but it was the newest 8 megapixel SLR they had. Nice camera, he paid a lot for it too. It takes full motion movies. He took my advice and got a 1gb card for it. So we take a few movies and some pictures and plug the camera into their new iMac. And wait. and wait. and wait some more. My god, why is this going so slow? It's been 10 minutes and it's not even 10% done!
The computer shows the camera is hanging off the USB FS (full speed, 12mbps) bus. Why? Is there a problem with the computer? Get out the manual for the camera. Oh.. my.. god... the camera is USB full speed, not high speed. (this is a difference between 12 mbps and 480 mbps for USB cable download speed!) I had to look in several places to confirm the horror. What were they thinking? This camera takes 200mb movies. That takes HOURS at that speed to download.
So we shuttle back down to the camera store and bought him a nice firewire card reader. Back home, we dump then entire card in 10 minutes, movies and pictures included.
This is inconvenient but gets the job done. There is simply no excuse to pay thousands for a camera that takes movies, and have the manufacturers shave a little off the price of manufacturing by substituting a slow USB chip in the camera. And that's all it is, one teeny little chip they just picked the slow one over the fast one. (they are functionally interchangeable, there is no need to redesign the camera) At the bulk they buy chips that can't have saved them more than a dollar per unit.
I have owned two Canon cameras myself and then there is this one. They have performed very well in all cases as excellent digital cameras. But incidents like this make me seriously consider changing brands. If that would have been my camera purchase, it would have gone right back to the store where it came from. Go to store, go directly to store, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?"
Because if your camera can write 1MB/s, it doesn't matter if your memory card has theoretical write speed of 1MB/s, 2MB/s, 4MB/s or 10MB/s. You will get 1MB/s of write performance in any case.
It's interesting that they tested memory cards with Canon EOS 1D Mark II camera that costs $3500. I wonder how the results would look if they would've used $350 camera instead.
I was interested in checking out this review, then i saw i would have to page through 20 pages of, well, pages, to make sure i hit their quoat of ads. No thanks, ill read up on fast memory at somone elses site.
Yes, i am aware that half the pages on the internet are like this, and i am also aware that the website owners need to make money. I dont care.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I have an expensive ($800) Digital Rebel XT 8MP camera. It doen't matter how slow of a card I put in it, it works great. It has it's own high speed cache to store like 8 pictures or so depending on settings, and write to the card seconds later. I can easily take a few shots a second, but, it's rare I need to shoot that. While some high end cameras have the write to card weakness, it's certainly not universal among the Ferrari Cameras. Those of you driving around in old yugos might need every bit of speed increase that you can get, you're better off getting a better camera though IMHO.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is there always someone who posts this comment. No shit, OMG PONIES firefox has ad blockers.
That doesn't mean putting a single page story on 20 pages is any more enjoyable to read.
You fucking karmatrolls are fucking annoying. You're like the little 6 yr old trying to get the attention of his parents or something. Shut the fuck up already until you have something insightful to say.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Hey, how about this editors...
I'll pay for a slashdot account once you
1. Stop allowing "anonymous" people to post to ad ridden review sites
2. Stop posting stories about ad ridden review sites that split the story to 30 pages
3. Stop even thinking about talking about ad ridden review sites
4. Mirror the occasional real story so we can actually read it the same day the story is posted.
It's called "not selling out". If I give you money I want something of value in return. If I wanted a barrage of retarded stories I'd head to Fark. At least they don't pretend to be a "news" website.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari? What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?
Someone (with a lot of money) bought one of Schumacher's old F1 cars and yes, it was contractually required that the car only be run on a specific brand of fuel.
The article summary is pretty oblivious though- you run the octane your car requires, 95% of the time. Gasolene companies love to make you think that filling up your low-compression engine (that requires 89) with 94 octane will make it faster, or "clean" it more. All grades of gas from the same brand have the same level of detergents, generally...furthermore, each kind of detergent is good at removing certain deposits but leaves others, so you're actually best off rotating which brand you fill up with. If you're obsessed about it, just pop in a bottle of Techron cleaner one tank before your next oil-change; it's the stuff BMW, Audi, and others recommend, though they'll charge you a lot more for Techron in a BMW or Audi bottle.) Also, most gas is delivered from port by a distributor that slosh-mixes in a bottle of stuff that "makes" the gas Exxon, Shell, Hess, BP, whatever. When a supertanker crosses the ocean, it doesn't have a "Shell" crude compartment and a "Exxon" crude compartment, etc. It's all the same stuff, a commodity...even though Shell likes to run commercials saying their gas meets manufacturer standards blah blah blah. EVERYONE's gas does, because EVERYONE's gas comes from the same damn crude, gets refined at the same places, and distributed by the same companies.
This is similar kind of "inadequacy" based BS. High end digital cameras have large buffers in part because flash memory is so effing slow; a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots! Running a slow memory card in them won't harm them, damage them, etc etc. There are other factors to consider as well- my canon 10D has a 9 shot buffer for RAW shots, and some sort of in-between buffer for writing them to the card. I used to hit the end of the buffer all the time, because I never noticed that it wouldn't process the buffer while the shutter was held half-down in the focus position. Talk about a design flaw- but knowing that, I kept my finger off the shutter button whenever possible if the buffer had anything in it (displayed in the viewfinder) and the problem disappeared.
As someone who has shot with a semi-pro dSLR for more than two years, I can summarize that article in one sentence: "if you need to shoot images as fast as possible and have a camera with a limited buffer, buy the fastest card within reason, only if Rob Galbraith's tests show it'll make a substantial difference. Otherwise, buy a reasonably heard-of brand with a decent warranty in case it stops working." Why? Because just like with the gas, under the label you'll often find exactly the same thing- and only a very small number of people actually NEED the extra speed of a card that costs 50%+ more.
Oh, last piece of advice: don't buy huge memory cards. Three reasons: 1)you pay more per MB, usually. 2)You put all your eggs in one basket- if you drop a card and step on it, accidentally hit "erase all", or loose it... you get the idea. 3)"Photo tanks" with laptop hard drives offer MUCH cheaper $/GB storage. You could shoot 2,3,4,5GB/day in RAWs on a big vacation and still not fill the smallest of these widgets after a week. Buying one without a drive and putting in the old laptop drive you've got hanging around from an upgrade (provided it's not too power-hungry) is the way to go, as even 30-40GB is a BOATLOAD of space for digital photos.
Oh, and should you be on a trip- bring a few DVD-Rs, and burn the files to one or two if you really want to have the photos. Laptops get stolen/dropped/lost/seized/whatevered, and you can be absent minded / mistake-prone about transferring photos after a week of fun in the sun (aka rm -rf * type mistakes). Put one set in your suitcase, another set in your SO's/friend's/etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Really, how can you have a roundup of CF cards without any from SanDisk? They're only what, the biggest company in that market? And they just released a new line of CF cards that they're touting as "the world's fastest cards" so this would have been a good time to see how good the performance of their products really is. Maybe instead of picking four random CF cards, Trusted Reviews should have just stuck to the SD card side of things this review, and then they could have done a more comprehensive CF card review in a future article. That way, they could have hit people with twice as many ads.
I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.
So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.
Stroller.
Another (and I think better) comparison site is here and it has also compares different cameras in conjuction with different cards, which is fantastic if you have one of those cameras. Even if you don't, you can tell whether the card is fast.
There are a lot of different aspects to testing nand flash performance. The burst speed of a 25MHz 4-bit bus (used in original SD) would be about 12.5Mbytes/sec. But data is not written immediately to flash, but stored in a buffer. An often quoted read/write speed of 9Mbyte/sec likely involves writes to consecutively addressed blocks and the SD memory block management system has a ready supply of erased blocks. Put a filesystem on top of the NAND memory block management system, and things get more complex. Fragmentation is going to be a problem here eventually as well. Did this test do any long term testing? Another factor (for PC testing) is the SD interface. Is this over USB or and SD slot such as those found in a laptop. The peak rate may be 60Mbyte/sec, but add protocol overhead, and again, random access times can be heavily affected. I went through this a little while ago and wrote a test program which measures peak USB flash memory performance 'under' the filesystem to as to try to attain the quoted peak speeds. I have write and read results for plain blue Sandisk (5 and 8 MByte/sec) and Lexar (5 and 4 MByte/sec) at http://s3u.sf.net/
My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor [wikipedia.org] that did 35+ mpg, ffs.
A UK Gallon & a US Gallon are different.
A UK Gallon is 1.2 * US Gallon.
You are getting 35 MPG(UK) is the same as 29 MPG(US).
Still the Morris minor seems more efficient