FASTEST CF Express B cards - 25 TESTED

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[thienanle]

How about reliability? Me as wedding photographer can not allow to take photos on a card which dies.

[JaspreetSinghArtist]

That 4TB card is a beast. Nikon should allow to record directly into SSD drive using type C just like Blackmagic let you do with BMPCC 6k/4k series.

[avi]

No Lexar diamond series? Description on B&H claims to be minimum 1600 mb/s write, almost 15% faster than the number 1 rated card here. Odd to not include it.

[komeilkarimi]

I advise very strongly against Angelbird cards.
I had 2 AV Pro 256GB casings literally fall apart just sitting on my desk. They confirmed they had molding issues. Now the SX 160GB is too chunky and doesn't fit in the Z9. Their response was to jam it in the £5300 camera card slot and it'll make space over time

[mikefize]

Thanks for doing this comparison! Greatly appreciated! I feel like the Angelbird 512 SE would've deserved an honorable mention as it's the cheapest card by far ($180 for 512gb) and a middle of the pack performer. I use two of them for Video on the Canon R5, no issues ever!

[Youtuber-kunk]

I've literally just watched your first video of testing cards and have just downloaded your pdf for latest updates, just a few minuttes ago. I did notice that it said that it had been updated today. While I was looking at the pdf I got a notification of this updated video. What a coincidence :)

[jpdj]

"Nikon may not have the facilities to make these cards" - Nikon has been leader (with Canon) in the development and manufacture of machines to make chips until early 2000s. Then ASML took over, by leading a consortium of parties. These machines are sold to "foundries" that "make" chips. Today, given the nano-scale-related-complexity of making components in chips, these machines are so expensive that there are not many factories left that "make" chips and one factory burning down in the CoVid era contributed to the worldwide shortage we still experience today.
While "foundries" "make" chips, they do not design them. The design of chips is done in specialized CAD software where circuits are defined consisting of transistors, resistors, capacitors, coils, connections, (logical) switches, etc., by the clients of the foundry. An example of a wold-class leading "designer" of chips is ARM that has never "made" a single chip. They always relied on foundries to "make" their designs. Almost all smartphones today (billions) have an ARM CPU or one derived off that. A "foundry" that people in photography know well is Sony Semiconductor. When we are told that "Sony makes Nikon sensors" then that is the most uninformed irrelevant remark in this chip-manufacture market. "Semiconductor" makes Sony-stills (KonicaMinolta) chips too. And the design comes from the camera manufacturer. Because foundries will evaluate designs for production feasibility, they have in-depth knowledge of chip manufacture and we can imagine a group of such engineers at the foundry working with the client so as to prevent the foundry having to tell the client in a late stage that what they designed is hard to make physically or will not perform well because of long connectors or layering problems. Here the foundry learns a lot from the client about what the client wants and needs, and such foundry teams work inside "Chinese Walls" to keep them separate from teams working opposite other clients. Leaking knowledge between such foundry teams is a sin that will get you fired on the spot, in such a context.
So, Nikon may have designed the card down to the deepest level - logically. Such a CAD design then must be converted into a physical design that the machines in the foundry can actually realize.
Or Nikon may have taken another brand's card and rebadged it. Potentially replacing the firmware.
Looking at the cards' capacities in this test by Matt, we see conventional digital capacities: 128, 256, 512, 1024, 4096. But we also see relatively "strange" 160, 320, 325, 640, 650, 660 numbers.
These strange numbers have an interesting history.
First how cards work in a wear or lifetime context. With each rewrite, the cells in flash memory wear out - electronics engineers call partial wear "brownout" as opposed to "blackout" that is complete and instantaneous. Defined differently on a deeper level, we could call this wear a form of brownout. This is to say that the lifetime of flash memory is finite in terms of how many times a cell can be rewritten - it blacks out at some point.
There are different ways to deal with this wear: (a) use better cells - significantly more expensive - for longe lifetime, (b) use cheap cells but provide more than labeled, i.e. more than visible to the host (this is called "over-provisioning").
The I/O controller in the flash memory with its firmware performs "wear leveling" and when the controller has more capacity than the label says, it can use this in its round-robin approach to storage, but there can never be more data visible to the host than labeled. This over-provisioning approach is purely there to extend lifetime. If we look at Samsung's SSDs, we see a line called "EVO" and a line called "PRO" and the difference in lifetime is about a factor 10 - in terms of cell rewrites. Because the card controller (firmware) keeps track of "blocks" instead of individual cells, a block marked bad by the controller will still have usable space, but this cannot be made available beyond the predefined number of block rewrites. Between an EVO and a PRO, the former may have 300 rewrite lifetime and the PRO 3, 000. Store write-once, read-many data on the EVO (OS, apps, content) and store data that are updated often on the PRO (page file, app setting data, catalogues, XMP files, etc.).
And, never reboot your Windows PC with SSD.
In a fulltime video production house, the card wear must be monitored and this must be based on awareness of what their cards can survive. Apps exist that can read a card's internal wear leveling database and report card health based on that.
With options (a) and (b) we have to understand that these are not mutually exclusive and for instance "data center" or "enterprise" flash storage exists that pairs expensive memory (a) with the over-provisioning of (b).
Now imagine a flash memory product with a capacity of 256GB advertised on the label that internally has 128GB more as over-provisioning (i.e. 384GB inside). Its price will reflect that and we may think it is expensive per GB.
Second - here come the odd capacity numbers. As card manufacturers (vendors) have built experience with over-provisioning cards in their own practice and the market place, they now backtrack a bit from the over-provisioning amounts. Imagine the 256GB card with 384GB under the hood and backtracking from over-provisioning: they shift 64GB from hidden to visible and now the same card is sold as 320GB - with a big reduction in the eyes of the buyer in the per GB price - the capacity on the label increased 25% with exactly the same physical product while the price may have increased a bit, even, for the same physical thing.

When we compare cards as to their per GB costs, we have to really include the expected lifetime of the card/memory cells. The industry has a parameter for that, called "Total Bytes Written". I asked one card vendor for that number with their cards and they answered "enough" - that felt like being given the middle finger and I will never buy that brand, ever, in my own lifetime. When I asked another brand, they politely gave the number - with the proper unit. If you have a card of 256GB (that's 0.25TB) and the card has a TBW of, say, 100TB, then the number of cell/block rewrites it can survive is 100/0.25 = 400 times. Filling such a card twice daily in a a video house means it "dies" after 200 production days - not because the electronics blackout, but because of the card's firmware shutting it down as some form of data integrity is no longer guaranteed.
So, buying used cards without knowing card health is very risky in this respect.
One YT photography influencer buys the cheapest simplest biggest card for his stills and fills them, but never reformats/erases/rewrites them - he said a couple years ago. The cards are a tax-deductible expense to him and part of his operational cost. To him the full cards are a form of backup. What he ignores, is how long the integrity of the data on the card is guaranteed when powered off. A debating group of people with degrees in electronics and quantum physics may agree that the answer to that question is "between 7 hours and 7, 000 hours". Quantum physics is 100% relative and 100% about chances, after all.
Here we have another quality of cards that is often overlooked: does the card implement a form of data integrity control (like ECC)? Some do and advertise it. Maybe cards that do not advertise it, do not have it.
And yet another that the electronics/quantum physics team will not overlook: the operating temperature range - enthalpy is no longer what it used to be. One vendor guarantees performance down to -25C (-13F) and almost all guarantee down to -10C (14F). If you have watched nature photographer Morten Hilmer on Svalbard and shooting musk oxen in Norway, then you may have seen his thermometer indicating -20C (-4F) and him (carelessly?) placing his camera in the snow out there. Carelessly, we wonder - well every temperature change generates the risk of condensation and consequential electronics issues and a warmer-than-the-air lens hood will cause thermal motion by heating the air in front of the front lens up, so this gives optical distortion that is very visible in shots with very long lenses with very large lens hoods. Not careless, but very thoughtful. And a challenge to both memory cards and batteries.

If we only look at $/GB and a bit of speed, then we overlook a world of complexities. Vendors - card brands - follow the economic principle to offer a package with partially hidden/masked/shielded qualities so as to make comparison difficult for the buyer. If we want to make serious comparisons we need to unmask those hidden qualities ourselves.

[zattu]

Angelbird AV Pro is a crap card. I bought a 500 GB one and use it once. Started to record mp4. 4k and the camera suddenly stopped and it went to freeze. Tried to shoot off the camera but nothing was working anymore. The only option was to get the battery out of the camera. After I turned the camera on again the card was not recognized by the camera anymore. Very disappointed because I could not shoot an event that I was paid to do it. For the amount of money that I paid for the card, this is unacceptable. Just want to mention that I am taking care of my tools and this is not a hate review. Is my experience with this card. Unfortunately, i can't upload a picture here as proof.

[gary_michael_flanagan_wildlife]

Thanks, Matt!! I admire all the time and effort you put into this test. I just bought an R3 so I’m trying to find a good pro card in the 160, 256, or maybe 512 range size. I’m only shooting wildlife stills so I don’t think I need more than that. Thanks.

[bigdhav]

Super helpful and informative as ever. Thanks Matt! Great work!

[mcunner]

SanDisk has always been my go to brand for reliability and quality since CF cards but since being acquired by WD their quality and reliability has just plummeted which is sad...

[Photographersforyou]

Hey Matt thanks for the time you spend doing these tests, your very informative, and with your busy schedule I really dont know how you keep up ! Can I ask however without using to much of your time - on your downloadable chart, you have the “angel bird EX” description (also described as slightly larger - what do you mean regarding larger ?) and its also capable of doing 8k video, Is this the SE version as I could not find an EX version, also On your YouTube video snapshot it does show an angelbird SE, is this that card ? and what do you think regarding using it just for video ?

[StudioGalvan]

Thanks for all the effort. I'm going to Download and Dive in ... to your Data! 🤓

[Interbeing_CDN]

Very helpful! Thanks for sharing Matt!

[Somnath_Goswami]

Amazing, superb analysis and we expect no less. Got myself a cobalt 160 GB . My budget is modest. Hope it matches the speed of it’s bigger cousins.

[marcusbraun]

Good overview of those cards, very useful. Suggestion: Add a price range to the PDF. Of course it's not possible to have accurate prices, but price ranges could make looking the cards up on the net easier. Something like "as of 2022" US$ 0-200, 200-500, 500-1000, +1000, to give one a rough idea for each card.

This will be interesting for me once the z9 comes down to the z7 type of camera, guess my (free with the z7 kit) XQD 64gb will get replaced then. As a still person I won't need particularly big cards, so 128-256gb will easily do. 170 bucks for the Angelbird 160GB AV PRO, not so bad.

For travel I still combine that puny 64gb card with a Nexto drive. $750 with 2TB SSD. Add a 2TB SSD for $200 (or a 2TB HDD for $60) and you get a 2TB storage solution with backup for under US$1000 without the need of carrying a laptop. Still my preferred solution for my trips as I like to be as mobile as possible. (The limited editing and sending images out to friends or for social media is done by cell phone.)

Not for everyone of course, but works very well for me.

[markmozley]

So I just got my Z9 and looking at cards. I photograph 40% wildlife, 40% landscape, 15% dogs, horses and rodeo people and the reminder is just general and portraits. I don't really do video unless it is horses fighting or bears. In fact I usually am so focused on the wildlife action for stills that I forget to do so. Taking that in mind which are these cards would you consider. Probably shooting in LL. Thanks

[danialmeister]

Matt, you are number one. Your hard work pays off for us. Thank You!

[gewglesux]

Reminds me of when i went crazy with the Sony Cards for my 850 when it was all the rage.. close to $3k in cards..
Thanks Matt!!

[JC-tdgg]

Does the Nikon Z 7 II take advantage of the CF Express Card's speed?