fastest compact flash for 7i?

Write performance is going to vary depending on how many flash sectors need to be erased to make room for new data and fundamentally there's a wide range in time that it can take to program a cell in the flash. Temperature and wear will also effect performance.

Depends on the price breaks I guess. In general, I'd rather go with CompactFlash just because there's fewer ways to lose your data with CF .vs. a magnetic hard drive. I'd also consider buying 2 smaller cards if the overall cost was a lot less.

One thing I can guarantee is that if you buy only what you need for now, you'll be able to buy bigger/faster for cheaper in the future.

He did add a new section for the D7i, and the best SanDisk Ultra was
21.6 seconds on the D7i - pretty bad compared to the 10.1-11.6
seconds of the 256MB Viking, Kingston, and Lexar 12x cards.
(n.b. the Viking, Kingston and Lexar 12x 128MB are about 14 seconds)

JonW said:

On Bryan's web page that you linked to, one of the San Disk Ultra's
delivered a 12.5sec raw file write. That's top notch speed.

Keep in mind the tests are user reported and the conditions of the
testing is going to be much more varied then if a single reviewer
conducted them.

Also be sure to look in the section titled "D7 Times: This table is
from cameras with 121 or 122 firmware only." Until he adds a new
section, those should be the closest in speed to the D7i.

Click to expand...

Aaron Bredon said:

He did add a new section for the D7i, and the best SanDisk Ultra was
21.6 seconds on the D7i - pretty bad compared to the 10.1-11.6
seconds of the 256MB Viking, Kingston, and Lexar 12x cards.
(n.b. the Viking, Kingston and Lexar 12x 128MB are about 14 seconds)

Click to expand...

Ahh, sorry. I see it now. That's a rather weird. I wonder why it's performance is so much worse then Minolta managed with the latest D7 firmware?

JonW said:

Aaron Bredon said:

He did add a new section for the D7i, and the best SanDisk Ultra was
21.6 seconds on the D7i - pretty bad compared to the 10.1-11.6
seconds of the 256MB Viking, Kingston, and Lexar 12x cards.
(n.b. the Viking, Kingston and Lexar 12x 128MB are about 14 seconds)

Click to expand...

Ahh, sorry. I see it now. That's a rather weird. I wonder why it's
performance is so much worse then Minolta managed with the latest
D7 firmware?

Click to expand...

CF Speeds with different cameras and even with different firmware
revisions of the same camera can be totally non-intuitive - there are
so many factors that can slow down the final speed.
See Rob Galbraith's Compact Flash Database for some speeds
in the Digital SLRs.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/media/compactflash/index.html

It is possible that Minolta made a change in timings that sped up most
cards but caused retries or other issues with the Sandisk Ultra.

Also note that Sandisk is NOT known for fast flash speeds - they only recently
came out with the Ultra, finally matching the speeds that Lexar and Hitachi
had in February 2000 (the 10X Lexars). It is possible that the Sandisk Ultra has
timing limitations - Lexar and Hitachi have had 2 years to refine the timing
on their controllers.