A-Data 32GB speedy cf cards
 

Anyone tried these things? They are the cheapest 2.5 hours I have ever seen.

I'm almost finished my review/write-up of CF cards. A-data was among the worst performers. While they weren't bad, they weren't great. In addition, it was the only one that gave problems with recording/pausing and sync was off by 3 seconds after about 10 minutes.

I've been testing several cards and it's been quite interesting as to the results.

The 32-A-data card isn't bad....but I'd personally spend a bit more for something else. I actually thought the Transcend's would give me some problems, but they faired better than many others - huge surprise to me.

Jesus Marshall... You've said you are almost finished with your write up for two weeks now... Is this what you tell your brides? :-)

Hey, thanks! I travel so much and am always out - I'm actually out of town now, typing this on my phone.

I'll have it done and complete on Friday and sending it to another forum....but I'll post some stuff here as well.

Jesus Marshall it is Wednesday already!! ;-)

It'll be published this coming Friday - finally -, but not on this forum. I don't know the specifics of linking to or mentioning other forums and such on DVInfo.net, so that's why I haven't posted anything thus far. It's actually been finished for a while.

Which card did best? Personally, I'm not surprised at Transcend doing well. Their cards tend to get very good feedback ratings from customers at Newegg. A-Data's flash memory cards don't get very good feedback ratings from Newegg customers, which surprises me a little, since their RAM memory for computers gets great feedback ratings.

I tested the following cards...

Sandisk Ducati 4GB
Sandisk Extreme IV
Sandisk Extreme III
Transcend 32GB
Transcend 16GB
Kingston 16GB
Kingston 8GB
Lexar 8G-133
Lexar 8G-300
A-Data Speedy

Those that faired best were...
Sandisk Ducati
Sandisk Extreme IV
Lexar 8G-300

Most of the cards were loaners, but I now own the following that are used with my four Z7U's...

9 Sandisk Extreme III 16G (not the fastest by any means, and had sync issues)
2 Transcend 32G (slower than some, but faired a lot better overall)
1 each of Lexar 8-300, Sandisk 8-IV

I should be getting one or two of the new Sony cards for testing but we'll see - Sony is so particular about who gets what.

Well, actually, a few years ago I did some testing on Transcend products and they did really poorly, and I was so shocked at how well they did overall. I also found out that they use Samsung and Toshiba memory in their CF cards, as many of the others use, so the ending results were almost the same. Makes me wonder how different the cards are other than branding.

Have you considered testing MiniDV tapes? It sure would be nice if somebody did that, but it would be a lot more work.

That'd be interesting. I wonder how that could be done, other than reliability and consistency ratings. I know tape strength tests could be an option, but I couldn't even guess who has that equipment.

A very useful measurement rating would be number of bits dropped per unit of recording time (minute, hour, whatever - to give an apples to apples comparison for different tape lengths). This could be done by recording a test file from a computer to tape, reading back to computer, and comparing the files to see how many bits are different.

The biggest difficulty I foresee, is a need to carefully clean the heads of the recording deck between each tape tested, otherwise the results could easily be considerably skewed. It would probably be a very good idea to test more than one sample of each type tape, preferably from different batches. The variation from tape to tape, even the same brand and grade, could be considerable. Measuring the variation could also provide a very useful rating.

It would be nice to measure head wear, but that would be far more difficult.

Sounds interesting, and I think you should handle that one! I don't think I'd have the patience for that one. It would be a decent test, though.

Please give more details about the A-data because if it works decently (even if it's not the fastest), I'm gonna pick one up this friday.

I'm not sure about the 32GB A-Data "Speedy" CF, but on Newegg's site, they say the 16GB "Speedy" is a 40X card. That card might be on the hairy edge of being capable of fast enough (real world) write speeds to capture a live HDV stream. Personally, I'd go the safe route, and get a 133X Transcend, for a few bucks more.

I would be really careful about which card you buy. I bought two Kingston Memory 16GB compact flash cards and even though they are 133x and make the minimum specification, they are not fast enough to work reliably with the Z7. I gave one to my daughter for her SLR camera and put the other in my Epson scanner so that I can scan without the computer, but I wouldn't have bought them had I known I couldn't use them with my Z7.

The much cheaper Transcend on the other hand works flawlessly.

The A-Data card is a 133x-20MB/sec. card.

In testing, the card had a sync issue of 0.9 seconds parallel to tape in one run, and 1.4 in another.

In addition, it had 2 dropouts in one of four tests and it locked up and froze in another.

It seems like the manufacturer's speed ratings (ala 133X) are based entirely on read speed (which is always faster than write speed). From what I've seen elsewhere, the write speeds vary dramatically (from brand to brand) for any given mfg speed rating. Did you do any write speed benchmark tests on the cards Marshall?

Large CF Cards
 

I was wondering if there were any issues writing to 32GB cards as these are the only ones I was going to consider using. I need to record long form. Some Sony rep I spoke with recently reckons you can't record to anything over 16GB, but according to everyone here is it possible to record 2.7 hours on a 32GB card? How do you record continuously while swapping tapes out for dual backup? Is this possible? I am planning to purchase two of these soon. Are they awesome cams?

To a degree I did, but since I couldn't measure the write speed for the camera itself it wasn't as much of a concern. You will notice a substantial difference, though, among all of the cards. There's very little consistency, unfortunately.

Some people have had good success with the AData cards; they failed some of my tests, however. You can use 32GB just fine as the minimum specs are only 133X-2G size. To film on both but being able to change tape, read the manual, but there's a setting in the camera to do this; just don't sync them together.

Transcend 32gb test
 

Just tested 32gb Transcend CF card that was delivered yesterday. I buttoned my Z7 on and off a few times during the 3hr test and the four clips ranged from 23 min to 1 hr 6 min.

All the HDV footage has now been transferred to hard drive via FCP log and transfer window. It shows up fine with no faults, green lines, broken code or other issues mentioned in posts.

Leaving the recorder rolling till the card was full, I recorded 2hrs 43 min and 20frames of HDV footage.

This was without shooting tape. I'll test with tape next plus will test the cache recording function (does cache work while shooting tape as well? What happens to timecode?)

On the desktop the recorder shows the footage to be 30.06gb in size.

Generally, having the ability to shoot for nearly three hours is a superb option but I am not very confident about shooting to CF alone and would definitely use tapes as well. That way, a back up and archiving solution is taken of.

Mickey

With my Transcend 32Gb's I'm getting an occasional clip with missing timecode, and several with a green start. Recording to tape in synchro mode and I think the problem lies in hitting the record button quickly after the previous clip - something that I have to do often filming weddings!

I had similar problems with the Transcend 32GB cards. I switched to Transcend 16GB 300x cards and so far I've had none of the problems that I had with the 32GB cards.