Memory Cards--What is the absolute best?

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#2
The best one is the one you have. All brands are pretty much the same except for the printing on the shell. There are some gimmicks - a steel case is one, but the electronics are pretty much the same for any given speed class.
Maybe I should amend my answer to say "whichever major brand is on sale". Good luck
 
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#4
See this:

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/09/beware-counterfeit-memory-cards-being-shipped-from-amazon-warehouses/

Also, taking in account what others have said, (almost) all brands have inside, in fact, Toshiba NAND chips. Yes, the reliability of the case and the controller can make a difference but usually the competitors are quite close one to another - of course this applies IF the said brand is genuine and complies to specs on the label/product package (see the link above).

From my experience Transcend gives a very good price comparatively with the two well-known brands (Lexar & SanDisk). Also, I didn't have any bad surprises with Transcend cards (CF 600x & SD Class 10 cards).

HTH
 
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#5
...me again. Another thing:

Perhaps is wise to not buy a faster card than you need. For example my Transcend 32 GB 600x can keep up with the burst rate of my camera (5D Mk3). Hence I'm not interested in 1000x cards. Perhaps only if I'll shoot in the future using CR2+JPG. But since this possibility is quite low I will not invest my money in an 1000x card which, in fact, I don't need.
 
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#6
John Thomas said:
Also, taking in account what others have said, (almost) all brands have inside, in fact, Toshiba NAND chips. Yes, the reliability of the case and the controller can make a difference
Click to expand...
Isn't controller the most important part when it comes to write speed?
 
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#8
John Thomas said:
Also, taking in account what others have said, (almost) all brands have inside, in fact, Toshiba NAND chips. Yes, the reliability of the case and the controller can make a difference
Click to expand...

But since there is no controller on sd cards you're saying it doesn't make any difference which sd you buy?

And another question: Are slower cards more reliable than faster ones? Usually the latest bleeding edge gear is less reliable simply because a) it's newer and there's less time to iron out bugs and b) faster gear is often over-tuned, at least with computer components.
 
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#9
Been using SanDisk pretty much exclusive over the years and have not had any issues (knock on wood). Extreme for CF and I have some Extreme Pro on order now that the price has dropped. I use slower and less expensive SDs on my P&S cameras.

I like putting fewer eggs in smaller baskets so all my CFs are 16 gigs.
 
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#11
When I started in digital (back in 2003), I shot with SanDisk. Then I had two SanDisk cards die on me, and switched to Lexar pro cards and haven't had an issue since. Mind you that was 2003, and I could have just been unlucky... It would be neat if someone actually did stats on how long the cards last and how reliable they are. I only shoot Lexar since they haven't failed me once, but it could be SanDisk is way better now...
 
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#12
Greatland said:
I have used SanDisc cards since I switched from film to digital cameras. I shoot a 1Dx and a MKIV.....what is the absolute best card that I can put in my cameras?
Click to expand...
It all depends on what the term best means to you. You do not always get all the attributes you want.
Fastest?
Most reliable ?
Low Cost?
High Reliability and high speed cards exist for industrial, military, and aeropace applications, but they tend to cost more. Some might call them the best, but it depends on your application. Buying into metal frames and burn-in is expensive.
For example: http://delkinoem.com/compactflash-high-performance-extended-temp.html#tab-4
 
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#13
I've experienced a dead/corrupt card with both SanDisk and Lexar, but only one of each over the past several (5+) years. It is really a tossup, like an earlier poster said, whichever major brand goes on sale. Don't buy the Hoodman stuff unless you really need a steel SD card lol. They are way overpriced and the money saved can be better spent on other gear you need.
 
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#14
Kit. said:
John Thomas said:
Also, taking in account what others have said, (almost) all brands have inside, in fact, Toshiba NAND chips. Yes, the reliability of the case and the controller can make a difference
Click to expand...
Isn't controller the most important part when it comes to write speed?
Click to expand...

Hmmm.... well... yes and no. It depends. Theoretically all things being equal, yes, of course. But in our concrete case, generally no. (Ok, not so much).

Let me explain:

The cards are rated to 1000x, 600x, 400x aso. Hence their sustained data transfer rate must be somewhere around these values. Hence very different write improvements (like different arrangements of RAID-esque architectures etc.) will push-pull the card in another speed class. An exception here is SanDisk whichd doesn't obey to the standard rating of "NNNx" varies significantly the speed in the same line (eg. 'Extreme Pro' line) which indeed indicates that they use different controllers / data access strategies (for ex. stripping) or other enhancements in different edition of cards (it seems that 128 GB is the fastest and 64 GB is the slowest by a perceptible margin).

Also, another thing to note is that the main bottleneck (like in the case of computers) is, by far, the storage media, followed by the data access type (eg. RAID type - the number of stripes). Yes, the controllers can make a difference but not so much, and, also, bear in mind that in the card market isn't easy to enter, hence hardly one finds a 'cheap' solution with a 'bad' controller (except, of course, fake labels, as I mentioned in my earlier post).
 
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#16
John Thomas said:
The cards are rated to 1000x, 600x, 400x aso. Hence their sustained data transfer rate must be somewhere around these values.
Click to expand...
That's their linear read rate.

Unfortunately, their write speed is not determined only by their "data transfer rate". The reason for that is that the flash can only write into pre-erased blocks, and the size of erase block is big, in the order of several megabytes (whereas FAT32 cluster size is in the order of several kilobytes), the erase operation is slow, and the writes almost never happen to be by full erase blocks.

The controller writing logic is quite complicated and consists of a lot of tradeoffs (such as for which file sizes to optimize the erase blocks de-fragmentation logic). As a result, for example, one card can be faster than another in writing JPEGs (smaller files), but slower in writing RAWs (larger files).
 
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#17
Kit. said:
John Thomas said:
The cards are rated to 1000x, 600x, 400x aso. Hence their sustained data transfer rate must be somewhere around these values.
Click to expand...
That's their linear read rate.

Unfortunately, their write speed is not determined only by their "data transfer rate". The reason for that is that the flash can only write into pre-erased blocks, and the size of erase block is big, in the order of several megabytes (whereas FAT32 cluster size is in the order of several kilobytes), the erase operation is slow, and the writes almost never happen to be by full erase blocks.

The controller writing logic is quite complicated and consists of a lot of tradeoffs (such as for which file sizes to optimize the erase blocks de-fragmentation logic). As a result, for example, one card can be faster than another in writing JPEGs (smaller files), but slower in writing RAWs (larger files).
Click to expand...

There's also trade-offs in the type of NAND flash that is used. SLC generally being fastest, while MLC tends to be a bit slower. I wouldn't be surprised if modern CF cards look a lot like modern SSDs on the inside including controllers & firmware. However they're still stuck in the parallel days, so I hope that QXD or CFast get put into all future cameras, or at least the ones that have CF cards now. I'd actually prefer QXD, since it's based off of PCI-Express. I can start to imagine all of the possibilities with some kind of open SDK to let 3rd party accessories hang off of that. Imagine hanging a modern SSD off of that with it's hundreds of MByte/sec write speeds! You'd never run out of buffer with write speeds like that.
 
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#18
I've used Sandisk Extreme Pro Cards for the past 10 years or so, had no issues at all with these cards, currently use 128GB/64GB 100mb/s UDMA7/VPG-20 Cards. I recently tried Lexar Pro 128GB 100mb/s UDMA7 VPG-20 Crds as well, purchased 3 through Amazon & had to send one back as it was a Dud from the Box, but the other 2 have also worked flawlessly.
 
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#19
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