I also did the DIY route as well.
My DIY card uses a 1TB sabrent rocket 2230 SSD. Because it has a fast large cache area. One of extremely few card that are suitable. It is also capable of all the various data rate 8k that the nikon can do. At least it is until the card is between half and 2/3rds full. Then it stops. Why is that?
Because the various "pro" cards like the delkin etc use exactly the same fast NVMe internals as my DIY cards. But they are over provisioned.
That means a 350GB or similar rated capacity is really a 512GB card under the skin. But around 1/2 to 1/3rd of the cards data area is kept hidden away in firmware. Its there. To be used as write cache. But is invisible to the end user. Thats because these cards are all using the actual data area as the fast write cache. This cache area gets smaller as the card fills up. So inevitably they slow as they fill. So to make a card that writes to the "end" of the card at high speed they need to restrict its data area size.
So if you use the fast 1TB card for example as I did, (1TB Rocket Pro NVMe SD dont use the 512, or 2tb ones! too slow) and format it as the full 1TB but make 2 partitions. One as 600GB visible to use. And one HIDDEN partition taking up the rest of the space then you have the exact same thing as a 600GB pro card. For £100 complete. That does the exact same thing as these overprovisioned pro cards do. And then you can write the 600GB at high speed till its full no prob. Didn't you ever wonder why the fast expensive cards are odd sizes? Instead of 128, 256, 512, 1TB, 2TB etc they are always around 325, 330, 350 or 625 or 1500GB or whatever.
Well this is why. Even the fastest 2230 NVMe ssd's have inadequate room for the required seperate fast cache to allow full write speed for the complete card. And all the pro cards are just NVMe potted in a case. And so instead they restrict the size and reserve the rest as fast write cache. Thats why they are expensive! You are really buying a fast NVMe and also its a bigger GB card that only allows you to use a part of it. Over-provisioning the RIGHT ssd card, allows high speed until its user space is 100% full. But wasting the hidden part.
Woo. Thank you so much for your reply.
Is it this one
https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Rocket-2230-Performance-SB-2130-1TB/dp/B0BQG6JCRP
And... Is it ok to leave it as 1tb and use 600gb fast and 400gb slow?
And how come the 2tb is slower than 1tb?
What adapter do u use? I tested my diy card amd get 1000mbs in pc. In theory, it should be enough for z8 but not in reality
In order...
600 fast then 400 slow? Yes. But at least you will know why it stops at just over half the card! At slower data rates, you may get longer. At 4k 30 you might get the ful card. Say 4 hours of video. And same with photos.
Why not the 2TB one? The 2TB card uses slower memory. And is just a slower card. It substitutes speed for capacity in the tiny physical space available on these cards. So it cant write the cache to memory fast enough. Theres a lot of reviews online comparing them to other cards.
The 512 is also slower and has half the write speed. So only the 1TB one is good for what we need.
I used the alloy aliexpress ones... Super cheap.
I got a black one, with a label for 1TB and it looks and fits better than most of the rest. I tried a few. Some dont fit or release reliably. This one is perfect.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005800646040.html
Probably get the same quality with Zitay. There are many dodgy ones available!
And yes your link is the correct card.
