a cut and paste of a thread my son did for another forum ,as he is trying to find a fast card for his new 7Dmk2 interesting and worth absorbing .
Thought it would be worth letting you all know my findings while looking for a new memory card for the 7D Mk II Thursday night.With a faster card you can take more images in a sequence especially when shooting Raw as the buffer fills up and clears quickly.
I was drawn to the Lexar 800X card which is about £40 for a 32GB card. Great I thought about £10-15 cheaper than the equivalent Sandisk card. But after looking into it the 800x card only gives you the 800X speed (120MB/s) on the read speed not the write speed. It took a bit of digging and as they don't mention on there site the write speeds, only that there lower than the read speeds. I found on youtube and amazon reviews that it actually writes at 56MB/s. This is quite a difference from the 800x (120MB/s) the card is rated for.
I mashed my head looking at the different cards and sites trying to find one that had a fast write speed but didn't cost the earth. Really for me I know that lexar and Sandisk (my current choice of card) is rated highly and I didn't want to go to a different brand for fear of inferior products. I know that with the SD cards I have some higher rated cards ( again for read speeds) actually give slower write speeds which I have tested in camera ( 70D) and speed that the buffer fills faster and clears slower, as you would expect I guess expect but the difference is about 5 seconds for clear time which is a lot when your out there in the field.
After looking around I found Sandisk seem to be one of the better makers for cards with read and write speeds being close to each other. The Current SD card I use a Sandisk Extreme 32GB is rated at 40MB/s Write and 45MB/s Read and the card says on it 45MB/s. It's close enough to be fair I'd say. After much digging I decided the best value card would be an SD card! A Sandisk extreme Pro 32GB card which is a 95MB/s card, yes for read but thankfully 90MB/s for write. Again only 5MB/s in it. This card is also £40 but much faster than the 800X CF at writing. I didn't want to get another SD card but it seemed like the faster choice for the money, Im just hoping it is as manuals suggest that CF will give the best speeds but I can't see that unless you get a CF card that actually writes faster. Once I get the card I'll let you know how it performs. I really am surprised and a bit shocked that Memory card ratings are based on the faster of the 2 speeds which is almost always the write speed that has no benefit to how quickly images are saved to them in your camera only how fast you can play them back or download them to a computer.
My advice is look into both read and write speeds before buying your card, Make sure your camera supports the standard for the card your getting as the fastest CF cards are UDMA 7 and the fastest SD cards are UHS-I , and if your camera doesn't support those you won't see the benefit.
Thought it would be worth letting you all know my findings while looking for a new memory card for the 7D Mk II Thursday night.With a faster card you can take more images in a sequence especially when shooting Raw as the buffer fills up and clears quickly.
I was drawn to the Lexar 800X card which is about £40 for a 32GB card. Great I thought about £10-15 cheaper than the equivalent Sandisk card. But after looking into it the 800x card only gives you the 800X speed (120MB/s) on the read speed not the write speed. It took a bit of digging and as they don't mention on there site the write speeds, only that there lower than the read speeds. I found on youtube and amazon reviews that it actually writes at 56MB/s. This is quite a difference from the 800x (120MB/s) the card is rated for.
I mashed my head looking at the different cards and sites trying to find one that had a fast write speed but didn't cost the earth. Really for me I know that lexar and Sandisk (my current choice of card) is rated highly and I didn't want to go to a different brand for fear of inferior products. I know that with the SD cards I have some higher rated cards ( again for read speeds) actually give slower write speeds which I have tested in camera ( 70D) and speed that the buffer fills faster and clears slower, as you would expect I guess expect but the difference is about 5 seconds for clear time which is a lot when your out there in the field.
After looking around I found Sandisk seem to be one of the better makers for cards with read and write speeds being close to each other. The Current SD card I use a Sandisk Extreme 32GB is rated at 40MB/s Write and 45MB/s Read and the card says on it 45MB/s. It's close enough to be fair I'd say. After much digging I decided the best value card would be an SD card! A Sandisk extreme Pro 32GB card which is a 95MB/s card, yes for read but thankfully 90MB/s for write. Again only 5MB/s in it. This card is also £40 but much faster than the 800X CF at writing. I didn't want to get another SD card but it seemed like the faster choice for the money, Im just hoping it is as manuals suggest that CF will give the best speeds but I can't see that unless you get a CF card that actually writes faster. Once I get the card I'll let you know how it performs. I really am surprised and a bit shocked that Memory card ratings are based on the faster of the 2 speeds which is almost always the write speed that has no benefit to how quickly images are saved to them in your camera only how fast you can play them back or download them to a computer.
My advice is look into both read and write speeds before buying your card, Make sure your camera supports the standard for the card your getting as the fastest CF cards are UDMA 7 and the fastest SD cards are UHS-I , and if your camera doesn't support those you won't see the benefit.
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