CF Card Speeds

Hi,
I just noticed a thread a while ago relating to 'high speed' CF cards from Canon, and it pointed to this site:
http://www.dpreview.co​m/reviews/canong3/page​11.asp

I did some speed tests a couple of months ago with a few different CF and SD cards, and the conclusion was that the SanDisk range of cards are incredibly slow.
Testing the range of third party cards I had available (I was helping out in a friends PDA shop) showed the PQI brand were the quickest we sold, and the differences were incredible.
Here are some timings I took:

Transferring 2MB of data using a PDA (Compaq iPaq)
PQI 0:42
Sandisk 2:40

Format & verify on PC
PQI 0:27
Sandisk 0:59

Taking 12 photos in the G3 auto mode then writing them to CF card:
SanDisk: 41secs
PQI: 28 secs
(Removing the time taken to grab the photos, approx 10 seconds, gives the storage times of 31/18 seconds)

These speed differences were consistent across card capacities, and even across to the SanDisk SD cards.

In everyday use the difference is significant and very noticable, applying to both reading and writing, showing the PQI store is up to three times faster than my 16MB Nikon, 32MB Canon, 64K Kodak, and 96MB SanDisk, all of which are badged SanDisk cards.

In the G3 you also notice the speed difference when browsing the thumbnail previews, moving from page page.

Just some observations I thought people might be interested in when choosing a new CF card

Cheers,
Jason

Has anybody done a similar test with a G3? My understanding from what I've read on the internet is that the performance of each CF card can vary with the equipment they are used with. However, the only "absolute" conclusion I've seen is that SanDisks ARE slow no matter what device they're used on.

At the last minute, I opted for more memory in a Lexar 512mb 12x than Lexar's 256 mb 24x. When I get the camera in (hopefully by next Wednesday-Thursday), I will shoot in RAW mode, maybe a few in JPEG superfine and see what's what. Personally, I think most all of my shooting will be in RAW mode.

Will report results on capture/writing time and transferring to my hard drive. I do have a Kodak card reader, so I will probably use that.

Regards,

Kerry

The middle test was with a G3:

Taking 12 photos in the G3 auto mode then writing them to CF card:
SanDisk: 41secs
PQI: 28 secs
(Removing the time taken to grab the photos, approx 10 seconds, gives the CF storage times of 31/18 seconds)

Also, moving between pages of thumbnails is noticably faster with the PQI, although opening an individual image doesn't seem much different.

Cheers,
Jason

I was asking about this a while ago, I was concerned whether the G3 was actaully able to take advantage of faster cards, or whether it was limited by the memory bus. Good news is that the camera's memory bus is not limited.

I bought TwinMOS 256MB 24x card which i found somewhere is supposedly faster at writing than the 128MB. This card appears to be twice the speed of the bundled card, based on timings of taking a single picture in RAW format and timing from the shutter click to the light stopping flashing, the timing dropped from 8secs to just over 4 secs.

It would be really useful if manufacturers supplied MB/s read and write times (Nb. the two can vary considerably!!), failing that this is the kind of information that we could provide each other.