Lexar UHS-II card is slower than UHS-I on X-Pro1

[rick.estrada]

Took a break from work this morning to measure how poorly the Lexar UHS-II x1000 card performs on my X-Pro1. Another forum member had stated that the x1000 card is not the best. So after testing it, I found my "slower" UHS-I SanDisk Extreme Pro 95mb/s cards are much faster than this Lexar card on the X-Pro1.

Also, the Lexar card on the X-T1 didn't really impress me, so it's going back to Amazon!

Hope this helps!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wfzUmWELr4

[CRAusmus]

Are you not counting the number of frames you are getting with each test?  It seems to me like you got more frames in the buffer on the first test before it bogged down, and less frames on the second.  The buffer seemed to bog down quicker on test two, but without counting the frames your getting, there is no way of knowing for sure.  Naturally it'll take longer to write 20 frames then it will 15...

[rick.estrada]

Are you not counting the number of frames you are getting with each test?  It seems to me like you got more frames in the buffer on the first test before it bogged down, and less frames on the second.  The buffer seemed to bog down quicker on test two, but without counting the frames your getting, there is no way of knowing for sure.  Naturally it'll take longer to write 20 frames then it will 15...

Hi CRAusmus,

Yes, I did count frames taken during the 10 second shutter hold and each time, the camera took 17 frames.

I formatted the card after the first test as you see in the video so I used Audacity to look at the audio waves of the video so I could audibly and visibly count the frames from the first test.

The second test, I simply counted the number of RAF files on the card.

Thanks!

[plaidshirts]

I found my "slower" UHS-I SanDisk Extreme Pro 95mb/s cards are much faster than this Lexar card on the X-Pro1.

 

It seems the UHS-II cards are slower than the UHS-I cards if you use it at the older format.

My Lexar Pro 300mb 2000x SD card was considerably slower than my Sandisk Extreme Pro in my XPro1 and X100S.

I originally bought it for my XT1 and it was blazing fast - much faster than the Extreme Pro - but I sold the XT1 and kept the card.

The moral of the story is buy the card that matches the capability of the camera. Otherwise you're wasting money and even getting less performance.

[cug]

UHS-II cards provide more speed by offering a "wider path" to the storage (using more pins, basically pushing more bits at the same time). If the camera can't support that, a UHS-I card using a "narrower path" better can be faster.

 

So, what you are seeing is that your camera can't use the higher throughput because it can't use the additional data paths. Not the card is slow, you just bought the wrong card for your camera.

 

If you want to test raw speed of your card, put it in an adequate card reader with a fast connection to a fast port on a computer:

 

 

Little-One:~ cug$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Untitled/ddfile bs=8k count=200000 && sync"

200000+0 records in

200000+0 records out

1638400000 bytes transferred in 7.655542 secs (214014889 bytes/sec)

 

real 0m7.858s

user 0m0.108s

sys 0m1.795s

Little-One:~ cug$

 

That's about 204MB/sec write speed to a Lexar 2000x card. Tested on a MacBook 12", Lexar card reader through USB-C to USB adapter.

 

Here's what a Sandisk Extreme Pro can do on the same system:

 

 

Little-One:~ cug$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Untitled/ddfile bs=8k count=200000 && sync"

200000+0 records in

200000+0 records out

1638400000 bytes transferred in 21.484287 secs (76260385 bytes/sec)

 

real 0m21.782s

user 0m0.107s

sys 0m1.689s

Little-One:~ cug$

 

About 72MB/sec. That's about a third of the speed.

 

Now, sure, it's interesting to know what the camera can do, but it all depends on the overall system. Unfortunately, I don't have a Lexar 1000x card here for testing.