Nikon D4, D800 memory card performance tests (updated)

[eteam]

Since the original Rob Galbraith D4 and D800 memory card performance test results were posted, the Galbraith site has posted some interesting updates.
On the D800 page (updated 11-april-2012) test result page is found this note:

Note: An apparent bug in the D800 (firmware A:1.00 B:1.00) causes the camera to sometimes write to UHS-1-capable SDHC and SDXC cards at much-slower-than-UHS-1 speeds. We were able to workaround the problem by pulling the battery briefly, then inserting the card and not reformatting it (affected cards were instead FAT32- or exFAT-formatted using Disk Utility on a Mac prior to insertion). The slowdown is not consistent - some cards would exhibit the problem during JPEG testing but not NEF, or vice versa - and appears to impact SDXC more often than SDHC. In all instances the workaround worked, so the test results do show the camera's true UHS-1 write speed abilities when not tripped up by this problem.

In the D800 tests, the fastest CF cards show almost 70MB/sec write bandwidth, and the fastest SDHC/XC cards show over 40MB/sec write bandwidth.

Also, Galbraith has updated test results for the D3s and the D7000.
You may find it interesting that the D800 seems to do better than the D4 with the fastest CF cards (~68 vs. ~60 MB/sec), though the best performance by far is with XQD in the D4.

-- Bob Elkind

 

[RRRoger]

SanDisk has been more honest than others in their card ratings.
But how can they rate a SDHC card at 95MBs when a CF at 90MBs is almost twice the speed in real world testing?