False economy with CF cards

Started by hag, August 20, 2014, 10:46:08 PM

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hag

Just wanted to share some of my observations regarding CF cards I have made during the previous few months using RAW extensively.

This spring I have bought three 32GB KombuterBay 1000x cards to use with the 5D mkii (using the Oct24 build).

Two of them have died on me since then. One crashed during shooting Raw with the camera going black. Pulling the battery resoved
this, but the card kept crashing afterwards. Luckily all data was retrievable.

On the second instance the same thing happend, but the card remained inaccessible to both the camera and two different card
readers I have tried (under Linux and Mac). Which was a pain in , well it was a pain, I can tell you loosing the footage completely, since i thought,
oh well I can retrieve the data on the computer, but this time it wouldn't even mount..

I have now bought Sandisk's top of the line UDMA7 cards hoping to not have this happen again to me, though I suspect that with the massive amount of
data the cards are filled up with, it will always remain a matter of time before they say good-bye.

But I guess it is false economy for the 'intermediate to heavy' user to buy cheaper cards and having to replace them more often.

So from my experience I would advice users that are going to use RAW video quite regularly to stay away from KomputerBay cards.

hag

oh and just to add to this,

speed-wise they were doing fine, but they don't seem to hold up that well

PressureFM

Which spurs the question, what card reader do you have for the CompactFlash cards?

hag

Hi I have got the new Transcend UDMA7 card reader in use. Is this known to cause troubles?
I always nad solely format the crads in camera, too.

Frank7D

3 cards is not a meaningful sample size. I have two Komputerbay cards which I have used heavily for months and have never had a problem. I'm sure thousands of these cards have been manufactured and sold; you would need to survey a large number of users to get a real failure rate.

hag

Of course, it's not a scientific research I have conducted. I was just pondering whether or not it is wise to buy twice, if you are trying to save money. It's good to hear yours have been holding up. I have heard that Lexar and Komputerbay card come from the same factory so I changed to SanDisk. Maybe it is overkill, but loosing data isn't a great experience altogether.

For my particular example it would cost several hundred £s to have the data restored so it seems wiser to just get the most reliable card in the first place. So conssider this, if your card fails you in a few months time from now and you have to get another one you haven't saved money, but potentially lost data. I'd be eager to hear other people's experiences.

Maybe we can set up a page similar to this one to get more data
http://www.olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos5dmkii.htm

anothermonday

Oddly enough, I'm having similar issues with SD cards. Always have bought the Extreme/ExtremePro SanDisk cards but as of late they been giving issues of being difficult to read (via camera or computer) or just breaking apart completely. Same reader (iMac port) but still falling apart after a few months use.

Was advised by the 'older' photogs in my area to either only buy the ExtremePro line or switch to solely CF cards, but it doesn't make sense to have shell out $100+ for a premium product that's expected to croak after a season, much less multiple times over and over.