MT Shooter Loc: Montana

CF cards used to be much faster than standard SD cards, but SDHC cards have come much closer to matching their write speeds, and SDXC cards have matched their speeds thereby negating the speed advantage that CF cards had for so long. CF cards are still available in higher storage capacities (512 GB) than SDXC cards (256 GB) if you want really high capacity. XQD cards are the newest available technology but are currently only used in Nikons D4 and D4S bodies as well as some Sony video cameras.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Not necessarily.. Depends on the CF Card and the camera. My D70s will only take a max of 4gb CF Card. But I got a 3rd party CF to SD card adapter and it now takes 32 and 64 gb sd cards.. I can now shoot almost 6k pics in NEF on one 32gb card.. and it will also use Eye-fi...

caljr Loc: Indiana

Write speed is one thing but if the card you are using fails then the speed means nothing. I took a trip to Turks and Caicos last week and had a new SanDisk Ultra 32 GB card give me an error message and lost one hour of underwater images that I will never get back because they never got recorded to the card. Lesson learned always check a new card before you trust it and don't buy SanDisk. I talked to another photographer on my vacation and he had the same experience with a SanDisk card.

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

Sandisk are the most popular memory cards in the world and carry a lifetime warranty. This also makes them the most counterfeited card in the world. The only two SD cards I have ever had fail turned out to be counterfeit Sandisk cards that I bought from a "trusted seller" on Amazon. Lesson learned. When it comes to memory cards, only buy them from well known vendors, never on sites like Ebay or Amazon. Mine looked 100% legitimate, even the packaging looked real. I have several other Sandisk cards that I did purchase from real retailers and have never had an issue with them. In the last 2 years all I have bought is Lexar Professional cards though, SD, CF and XQD's.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

I thought some Nikon bodies can have the buffer memory upgraded. I believe a friend of mine had a D3 that he had the buffer expanded. This was a Nikon upgrade or it was a body that was special ordered. I can't remember.

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

Buffer upgrades have been available from Nikon from time to time. I had my D2X buffer upgraded at a cost of almost $200, it didn't speed up the recording time but did give me more shot capacity before the buffer filled. All in all I didn't think it was enough difference to justify the cost at the time.

caljr Loc: Indiana

Thanks for the info MT shooter, I should know that as a Mac user the virus guys go after the larger PC market not the Mac.

UtahBob Loc: Southern NJ

Never knew that - will have to keep that in mind for the future.

Something I learned about the D200 years ago was that the buffer on it goes from 19 shots to 10 shots if long exposure noise reduction is turned on - so I keep it off unless I'm in a position to need it.

wings42 Loc: San Diego, CA

Interesting. Buffer clearing in my D7000 when burst shooting flying birds in RAW seems excruciatingly slow.

UtahBob Loc: Southern NJ

Which card do you use - if a Sandisk Ultra that shows 30mb/s, that doesn't even have a set write speed - they only say it is less. If you are using the standard blue card, you really need to get a faster card.

You should get faster performance if shooting raw since you won't be writing the jpg. I do that if I want to shoot faster hdr panoramas on a motorized head.

Remember that my buffer with 9 shots won't clear for 8 seconds or so and that can seem like a long time when the bird decides to be in the right place for you.

This is the card I'm using:

http://www.sandisk.com/products/memory-cards/sd/extremeplus/?capacity=16GB

It shows up to 60mb/s write speed. Since I didn't see a 2x improvement from the Ultras (30mb/s read and write ??), I'm pretty much convinced that I'm maxed with this card in terms of camera performance.

I spotted this today and it pretty much confirms what I'm seeing in terms of speed:

http://sportsphotoguy.com/nikon-d7000-raw-burst-test/

If you watch for deals you can get great pricing on the faster cards - best buy had them two weeks ago at about a third the regular price. Got mine last December at $20 for 16gb.

You might be able to get by with the Extreme verses the Extreme Plus but it looks like the Extreme tops out at 30mb/s write so there is the possibility of squeezing just a tad more speed out of the Extreme Plus.

wings42 Loc: San Diego, CA

Thank you so much. The is the card I'm using: http://www.adorama.com/ISO32GUHS110.html . I fell for the 40mb/s designation and the low price. I just ordered two Extreme Plus cards from Adorama. If they make little difference on my D7000, no loss. I'll use them on my next, hopefully faster transferring camera (the soon to be D7200?).

UtahBob Loc: Southern NJ

Found that Sony card at B&H where they actually show specs:

Read Speed Maximum: 40 MB/s
Write Speed Minimum: 10 MB/s

If your particular Sony card was at the bottom of the spec range, I guess you could have been working with 10mb/s - if you can pop it up to the high 20's or more, you should be happy with the extreme plus cards you just bought. The potential between the read and write speeds as shown by this Sony card really means you have to look at both specs when buying cards these days (and from reputable sources as MT mentioned above).