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For the most part I use Sandisk Extreme Pro (64gb, nominal rating 170 mb/s) cards in both slots of my OM-1. I'm set up to write RAWS to one slot and Superfine/large JPEG's to the other. At the end of a day out I'll either copy or move the RAWS to my PC to review and/or work on while the JPEGs I may just scan through quickly on the PC direct from the card but generally just delete once I'm happy I've secured the days' RAWS. Either way, over the weeks/months both cards slowly fill up with files created over many separate shoots. Eventually when I get to probably 75 or 80% space used pre-shoot I'll quickly check through the card contents to make sure there is nothing I need to keep and then re-format both cards in the camera.
So, my question. Does the way I use the cards impact their performance, in particular write speed? I was out last weekend trying to photograph Swifts which often meant taking 50, 100 or more pictures at a time and several times hitting the buffer limit. Looking through the viewfinder you can see the free-space count increment as (I imagine) images are written to the card(s). While it's sometime since this caught my eye it SEEMED to me that it was clearing the buffer much slower than I remember from previous occasions. While this may all be in my imagination I did wonder if this could be impacted by what I imagine by now is an increasingly fragmented card (this assumes that card data storage works like compute hard drives where de-fragmentation can improve performance significantly). Any thoughts or comments welcome!
A second question on card performance. Before we did our Costa Rica trip last year I "invested" in a couple of Kingston Canvas React cards (64 gb, nominal rating 300 mb/s) in the expectation of spending times watching hummingbirds and after reading positive reviews/tests of this card. In practice I used a Kingston in slot 1 for RAWs and a Sandisk in slot 2 for the JPEGs as I assumed that the faster card taking the larger RAW files would be "balanced" by the smaller JPEG files written to the slower card. Does anyone have an opinion on this (I'm quite happy to learn that I'm totally misguided!)?
Before our next big trip I'll try and run a few tests myself using faster cards in both slots and if that works better "invest" in some more faster cards.
Chris.
So, my question. Does the way I use the cards impact their performance, in particular write speed? I was out last weekend trying to photograph Swifts which often meant taking 50, 100 or more pictures at a time and several times hitting the buffer limit. Looking through the viewfinder you can see the free-space count increment as (I imagine) images are written to the card(s). While it's sometime since this caught my eye it SEEMED to me that it was clearing the buffer much slower than I remember from previous occasions. While this may all be in my imagination I did wonder if this could be impacted by what I imagine by now is an increasingly fragmented card (this assumes that card data storage works like compute hard drives where de-fragmentation can improve performance significantly). Any thoughts or comments welcome!
A second question on card performance. Before we did our Costa Rica trip last year I "invested" in a couple of Kingston Canvas React cards (64 gb, nominal rating 300 mb/s) in the expectation of spending times watching hummingbirds and after reading positive reviews/tests of this card. In practice I used a Kingston in slot 1 for RAWs and a Sandisk in slot 2 for the JPEGs as I assumed that the faster card taking the larger RAW files would be "balanced" by the smaller JPEG files written to the slower card. Does anyone have an opinion on this (I'm quite happy to learn that I'm totally misguided!)?
Before our next big trip I'll try and run a few tests myself using faster cards in both slots and if that works better "invest" in some more faster cards.
Chris.
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