If you would like to post, you'll need to register. Note that if you have a BCG store account, you'll need a new, separate account here (we keep the two sites separate for security purposes).
Thanks for the suggestion, I was just looking at card readers this afternoon.
The ProGrade Gold cards tend to be slow, even slower than XQD cards, so personally I would avoid them. I agree with Eric that the Delkin Power cards are a very good performance for the cost and one of the best values available. You won’t notice the extra performance of a Delkin Black in a D500 but you might notice the lack of performance from a ProGrade Gold. I would not have an issue shooting a 64GB card all day in a D500, but everyone is different when it comes to how much they shoot. I primarily shoot with 128GB - 160GB cards in my Z7ii and Z9 and haven’t gone into overflow to the second card for comparison. I would think 128GB would be large enough for most people.
I tested the ProGrade Gold 128 GB CFExpress in my D850 and it was half the speed of the Delkin Power 128 GB card. ProGrade Gold is slower than most alternatives until you buy a 512 GB card or larger.
I think in practice there are only a small number of companies that disclose minimum write speed. To their credit, ProGrade makes a full disclosure. Even then, the speed in the camera is different (slower - depending on the bus and processor in the camera - a Z9 or D5 is faster than a D850 or Z7). My testing was pretty simple - I made a single long burst to fill the buffer, and then counted the frames the camera could shoot in each full second. You can either graph that information or multiply by the average file size to calculate actual write speed. With the D500 you should be able to shoot almost indefinitely because the files are only 20Gb for RAW and it has a fast write speed (the d500 shoots a 200 frame lossless compressed burst), but if you wanted to fill the buffer, you could use Uncompressed RAW.
Thanks for the information and I've noticed the same thing about the speed disclosures for the different companies as well. I doubt I'll ever need take 200 shots in a single burst but I'd like to know I could if I wanted to so that's my goal in buying a CFE card.
You may have seen the test results performed by Alik Griffin, linked below. It is talking about memory card speeds for the Z9, but has a breakdown of read/write speeds in card readers too. While you won’t be able to take full advantage of the speed in the D500, the information is still useful in determining overall card performance and performance/cost ratio. The list of all tested cards are below the recommended cards section.
alikgriffin.com
Thanks for this, looks like the 128GB Delkin Power performed great for the price although I do wish he had tested the 256GB ProGrade card since it's min write speed is more than 2x the 128GB card at 300MB/s as opposed to 140 for the 128GB.You may have seen the test results performed by Alik Griffin, linked below. It is talking about memory card speeds for the Z9, but has a breakdown of read/write speeds in card readers too. While you won’t be able to take full advantage of the speed in the D500, the information is still useful in determining overall card performance and performance/cost ratio. The list of all tested cards are below the recommended cards section.
Fastest CFexpress Cards Nikon Z9 | Alik Griffin
If you’re buying the Z9 today, you’ll want the 128GB Delkin Black CFexpress cards. They are currently the fastest card and should give you around 80 RAW lossless shots per burst.
If you have a challenge with availability, you could probably live with the 256GB ProGrade Gold or larger - just not the 128GB card. A number of manufacturers have different components in the smaller cards to help keep cost down, but it does impact performance. I have tested the Delkin Power card and it consistently shows up as being a good value.
You're saying I'd get less than half the tested speed than in the Z9? Is that because the D500 is incapable of taking advantage of one of the two data channels in the CFE cards effectively making it about half as fast as advertised? I knew I'd never see the same speeds as the Z9 is capable of but I didn't really think that it would get lowered by half or more either.
Yes - the D500 was released in very early 2016 - and designed in 2015. XQD was brand new - and had just been upgraded to XQD 2.0. The EXPEED processor was much slower than the Z9 EXPEED 7 processor, the bus used by the card to communicate with the camera is a much slower bus and has just one row of contacts rather than two on the Z9. CFExpress cards are next generation cards - and in the D500 you are using them in compatibility mode with everything else designed for a generation earlier. The D500 speed will be less than half the speed of a CFExpress card in the Z9.
Ok thanks for the clarification, at least the information in the chart above gives a good baseline for for the different cards performance in general.
I do like Delfkin and Prograds CFe cards.
