CF Cards - Where do you buy yours?

[Stewbyyy]

i can't believe people use Lexar....

I've had 3 fail...and any other pro's i talk to have had same experience and lost stuff..

everyone (in ireland) using sandisk for a while now...

I'm Irish and 95% of my CF cards are Lexar, I have 1 Sandisk and 1 really old 2GB Fuji card.

I've never had a Lexar card fail on me. I buy all of mine from Amazon UK and they're the best cards I've ever had for such a stellar price.

[Orangutan]

Here's my standard advice.  Sure, buy a decent brand from a reputable dealer, but don't leave it there.  I've bought mostly cheap cards from Amazon and Newegg (a lot of Transcend).  But I always test them thoroughly before I use them for anything important.

The easiest way to test a new flash card is using a disk wipe program, such as DBAN.  You make bootable media (CD or flash drive) and it wipes attached drives by overwriting several times.  I typically do a 20-pass operation on each new card.  If the card is good after 20-passes, it'll probably be good in the field (assuming you treat it with reasonable care).

CAUTION!!!: It's best to do this on a machine without a hard drive so you don't accidentally wipe your computer down to entropy.

[expatinasia]

Is there some reason why Google won't answer this question for you?

Google does have the answer to most questions, doesn't it.

However, I had never even considered buying my CF cards from the US before, and only discovered they were almost half the price of the UK by mistake. That's why I wondered whether other CR members in Asia and elsewhere outside the US, buy their cards there. Google probably couldn't answer that question, though it might be able to once it finds this thread. I also wondered whether the US was the cheapest, or whether I had missed somewhere else.

In fact this little discovery (for me at least) means I might be buying a bit more than just CF cards from the US in future.