John Navitsky
Well-known member
hmm, that’s a shell type, i assumed you meant an external one that could take a full size drive. i’ve built a shell type one using a sabrent rocket and didn’t get faster results.
CF Express cards, is the Delkin Power any good?
- Thread starter aringer
- Start date
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).
EricKlees
Well-known member
You must not be familiar with the m.2 drives. 2230 is the physical length of the drive so I believe 30 is the millimeters. So that's the only size m.2 drive that will fit inside the adapter the adapter comes with its own thermal paste and you put it together and you'll actually have a physical m.2 drive that's the shape and size and format and form factor for the CF Express type B slot.
John Navitsky
Well-known member
i am familiar. remember i built one?
the short drives tend to be lower performance so i was assuming you were talking about something like this:
JMT CFexpress Type B to M.2 NVMe 2280 Key-M SSD PCIe 4.0 Extension Cable CFe Converter Compatible for Canon R5 Nikon Z6Z7 Xbox Storage Card Adapter (25cm,R94ST) https://a.co/d/1G6SzV3
EricKlees
Well-known member
No I would mess with a drive that couldn't fully fire in the skit too close the door.
The short drives are so fast, u you by default get the full 1.8GB/s write speed of the Z9's PCIe 3.0 2 Lanes. It's so much slower then the drives are rated for the performance doesn't suffer.
John Navitsky
Well-known member
i think there are some crossed wires somewhere. the math doesn’t work. the samsung 970 evo does like 3300MB/, but that’s with 4 lanes and cfe-b only has two, meaning that card interfaced to cfe-b would only get you 1650MB/, which is about what i’ve measured with fast cards like the lexar diamond and none of those cards did anything special in the camera
Samsung MZ-V7S500B/AM 500GB 970 EVO Plus M.2 (2280) https://a.co/d/1jYpf3e
Samsung MZ-V7S500B/AM 500GB 970 EVO Plus M.2 (2280) https://a.co/d/1jYpf3e
Last edited:
EricKlees
Well-known member
I've never tested the actually speed. I just know with a 2230 m.2 drive you could shoot 20fps Raw in lossless and never hit the buffer. Assuming you can hit the full 1.8Gb/s speed of the hardware in the Z9. I vaguely recall the m.2 drive being a Saberant drive
I remember Alex Phan doing a video showing the Z9 never having a hiccup in 20fps Raw lossless at all over 1k frames.
A could people i know did this and saw it for myself as well. I have no need for that much speed so I'll use my Cobalt 325GB card tool it dies.
Cobalt, Delkin, etc, Don’t know it’s possible to produce a card that would never hit the buffer? For some reason they are not building it.
John Navitsky
Well-known member
there are several existing cards that should be able to sustain 20fps lossless compressed. they sustain that speed outside of the camera. but they don't in the camera. my conclusion (which is different than Eric's) is that there is an internal limitation in the *camera*.
i've personally measured these times:
EricKlees
Well-known member
Ok, but I'm telling you I've seen it. Take it or leave it.
CFE type B cards is not the same as using M.2 NVME SSD drives
EricKlees
Well-known member
You can get unlimited in camera with these adapted M.2 SSD drives
At which shutter speeds? Can go 1/3200 for how long?
Do you use one of these? From what I have read these DIY cards get extremely hot.
John Navitsky
Well-known member
Until someone comes up with a very specific formula of something that is known to work well AND IS REPEATABLE, I don't think this is a practical direction at this point and while I don't doubt Eric saw something demonstrated that was claimed to sustain 20 fps lossless raw, I personally think it's likely there was a flaw with the test (like they were actually in HE* or they had a shutter speed that slowed the frame-rate slightly).
I've done this with the Sabrent Rocket 2230 which is a high end, fast NVME 2230 PCI4 drive and claims to run cool and I was careful to thermally bond it to the aluminum case and I had problems trying to benchmark it in my CFE-b to PCI adapter, which is the only way to really know how fast the card is. I don't think there were any thermal issues in this configuration.
In practical terms this card works _almost_ as good as the high end cards like the Delkin Black, but it doesn't _quite_ match the performance in camera and it has weird quirks when benchmarking it outside of the camera.
The best performance I could benchmark was 1482.37MB/s in a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 reader (20Gb/s, ie ~2500MB/s USB) which puts it right below the Delkin Black, however that's not totally apples to apples because the Delkin number was in a CFE-b to PCI3 adapter. Put in the CFE-b to PCI3 adapter, it choked and I think I only saw numbers around 452MB/s, so clearly there are some weird interoperatbility issues, perhaps around being a PCI4 drive, maybe something else. The information I've heard that sounded the most probable is that which controller a given NVME drive uses matters since different controllers are better at different things.
The other thing we should consider is that I don't think most of the traditional 2230 drives were really designed for high performance. This is why I was interested in using a 2280 drive like the Samsung 970 EVO since we know it's represenative of high end PCI3 based drives that we know *were* designed around performance (and is natively PCI3). I might still try this because if anything is going to prove Eric's assertion correct, I think this would be it.
Random things to consider, drives are moving more and more to PCI4 and PCI5 so published number don't represent what they'll do in a PCI3 based system. In addition published numbers are based on the driving using all four data lanes, but CFE-b only has two, so the numbers will further be reduced. This makes it a bit hard to understand how to translate specs to CFE-b performance.
EricKlees
Well-known member
1/3200 over 1k images was were he stopped shooting
I'm curious what card and adapter would accomplish unlimited buffer. I built a CFE card using a Sabrent 2230 m.2 drive rated at 4300 MB/s and it performs at about 85% of the speed of my Prograde Cobalt, Delkin Black, Prograde Gold 4.0, and even my Angelbird CFE cards in camera.
Last edited: