CF cards

Does anybody know of a way to test the ACTUAL speed and capacity of a CF card besides filling it up on the camera and then timing the download time ? Thanks. Rad

There are benchmark applications. I use ubuntu, and its disk manager lets you benchmark a volume. I haven't cared enough to do that, though.

There ARE variables, if you take an image of something that is one solid color, it will have a smaller files size than one with two colors/4 coulours/etc.
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Tom McElvy
Virginia Beach VA USA



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Tom McElvy said:

There ARE variables, if you take an image of something that is one solid color, it will have a smaller files size than one with two colors/4 coulours/etc.
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Click to expand...

.. even when shooting RAW, which surprised me a bit.

Peter

Hi,

Also keep in mind with High Speed CF (&SD) cards if you are going to benchmark them that you may be limitied by your interface i.e Card Reader. Also if you are using a simple copy to hard drive to measure performance that may be the bottle neck as well.

If your card reader is USB 2.0 it has a theroretical max transfer of 60MB/s but about 40MB/s is about the most you'll ever see. It will be less if it's a cheap reader that uses an inferior controller.

Also if you are copying to a laptop for example that only has a 5400RPM Hard Drive expect to see about 30MB/s max

Proper Benchmarking programs will copy Data to RAM so hard drive speed doesn't play a part but your card reader may still be an issue.
Just a couple of things to keep in mind when testing cards...

Regards,

I would suggest checking out Roger Galbraith's site at http://www.robgalbraith.com .

He has a very extensive database of card/camera read/write speeds.

If nothing else, you can look at is process.

Mark Goergen

Doh!

[Rob] Galbraith

Canon uses lossless compression in CR2's. I don't know what algorithm they use, but CR2 is closely related to TIF which can be compressed.

ppage said:

Tom McElvy said:

There ARE variables, if you take an image of something that is one solid color, it will have a smaller files size than one with two colors/4 coulours/etc.
--

Click to expand...

.. even when shooting RAW, which surprised me a bit.

Peter

Click to expand...

Thankyou all very much. Rad