Speedy CF cards - beneficial or waste of money?

[mavman]

:roll: Does anyone know if those high speed compact flash cards that are made for digital cameras are compatible with pocketPC devices? I have seen cards that are 8x speed but don't know if pocketPC is able to utilize that extra speed. That would be very nice for a card that I would store all of my applications to and have quicker read/write access to them.

[Jason Dunn]

They are a waste of money - the Pocket PC doesn't have the bus bandwidth or CPU speed to take advantage of them (heck, most cameras don't). Save your money and get a "normal" card. :-)

[Dave Conger]

But you have to admit, marketing came up with a good idea on that one. It probably didn't take to much developing to increase the bandwidth on the cards end...and people that are always looking for the fastest and best would probably look to pick up a couple faster cards.

What advatage would a faster card actually have in a camera? I understand in a PDA (if it was supported by the hardware), but is there really a need to write pictures faster to CF cards? Or is it more for the transfer to a computer?

[brntcrsp]

I'm glad I stumbled across this thread. I was thinking of buying of of these cards. Now I just have to find one that doesn't suck as much power as the Mr. Flash cards.

[handheldplanet]

I've been using a Mr. Flash card since Christmas and haven't experienced any excessive power drain. It's worked great for me - you may want to reconsider!

[Take1]

Ditto. Iv'e been using Mr. Flash and have experienced no weird power drain using them. Urban myth in my opinion.

[RavenSBNC]

But even if theres no power drain why spend the money when the PPC cant use them any better then a normal CF?

[Tycho Morgan]

Ditto. Iv'e been using Mr. Flash and have experienced no weird power drain using them. Urban myth in my opinion.


I'll third this motion. I have two cards (128, and 64), and I've never had any advers problems with them. They work great, and were really cheep which is a big advantage. Who needs San Disk, high speed or not?

Cheers,

Sam

[kaiden.1]

Well;

I hate to burst everyones negative posts; however.....
I have a 128MEG 4X card. The Sandisk that I started with on my PPC. After I realized that I needed more memory (wish the manufacturers would understand that one!) I bought an IBM< Micro drive. And WOW was I impressed with the increase in speed that I was able to get from my PPC after loading it up the same way as I had previously done on the SanDisk CFII card. One problem; my MP3 files could not play consecutively without a small skip here and there. That drove me crazy. I still love my microdrive....... SO I bought a 256 MEG 12x speed Lexar CFII card. And the speed remains equal in my mind to that of my microdrive and my mp3's don't miss a beat! I believe that there is a difference. I have tested it and seen it on the same PPC so I HAVE experience! YES! Thelma there is a santa claus! :D

[Dave Conger]

I hate to burst everyones negative posts; however.....


Hmmm, don't think I follow you. Does the 4x card skip? Because you said the Microdrive did, but that isn't flash technolgoy but actually a spinning disk. The problem with a spinning drive is your device buffers some of the file so eventually this can cause the drive to stop spinning. When your device needs more data the drive has to spin up again, hence the lag.

With flash, the bus speeds are more of the limiting factor since there are no moving parts. You probably wouldn't see a difference in your device froma 4x or 12x card, but in a laptop with a PCMCIA card adapter you could see a difference.

[Aceze]

Ugh! I think it's quite the opposite... The Microdrive (I have the 1GB model) ticks me off to a huge extent, as it spins down almost immediately after an access (to "save" energy no doubt, although that's debatable what with it having to spin up every time you access it!) - so it's actually SLOWER than a regular CF card (due to all the wasted time spinning up/down). It's horribly annoying when you're playing a game or accessing things from the CF. Once things are cached, it's not too bad, but every time you access new data - lag city!!

That said, I've been looking for a decent 256/512 CF1 card for a good price up here in the GWN. :)

I'm fairly sure there was an article comparing CF card speed from the various manufacturers a short while back - with some fairly surprising results (ie. the premium cards werent giving premium performance!). I'll see if I can dig up a link...

Aceze

[Aceze]

Okay I found the article:
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/mediacompare/

(2nd time I'm writing this as this freakin page keeps forgetting my log in session!!!)

Steer clear from the (high premium) Sandisk cards, especially their "fast" card Ultra line (which as you can see is a sham). I've always found Sandisk rather shady (what with the whole 1000 bytes=1kb BS), and this pretty much confirms it. The ridata seems to be the leader in performance. Dont be fooled by the Microdrive numbers - I dont think the MD is appropriate for PDAs, due to the constant spindown/spinup problems (it doesnt have much data to move, so it spins down WAY too often, causing lags when you have to access data). If I had to do it over, I would have bought a 256/512 mb CF1 card.

Aceze