http://photofocus.com/2009/06/30/long-term-test-udma-flash-memory-lexar-won/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:39:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://photofocus.com/2009/06/30/long-term-test-udma-flash-memory-lexar-won/#comment-23568 Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:11:10 +0000 http://photofocus.com/?p=5451#comment-23568 [...] Over the years I’ve acquired a number of different CF cards from different manufacturers.  I wanted to find out the life expectancy of a CF cards.  They’re solid state and have no moving parts. But, I needed to find out how often and if they needed to be replaced.  At first I thought that I’d had to replace them every year.  Heck, when I used to shoot film my yearly bill for film and processing was above 15k. So the thought of having to replace my CF cards on a yearly basis seemed pretty painless in comparison.  After a conversation with my camera rep Barry at Samy’s in Santa Ana, who’s a really knowledgeable guy, I thought that I’d give Hoodman a call and see what I could learn from them about the longevity of their CF cards.  Here’s what I found out.  According to Hoodman, where I spoke to one of the owners of the company by phone (pretty cool that you can do that….try doing that with Lexar or SanDisk), their cards are built to last for 500,000 cycles.  In other words, you could shot on their cards and erase the info 500,000 times before they are supposed to fail.  That’s allot.  In fact Hoodman cards are built to last twice as long as any other card on the market.  The second thing and this is pretty amazing and its a HUGE one is that:  Hoodman claims they have never had a case of data loss in the field. Which means that no photographer has ever lost data while using one of their cards.  That’s great peace of mind.  Hoodman CF cards are likely the most expensive CF cards on the market.  But remember:  You get what you pay for. And the peace of mind when photographing high end weddings and high profile commercial jobs is worth it IMHO.  You just can’t afford to loose that data.  And if you feel like your wallet is a bit smaller after purchasing Hoodman UDMA RAW compact flash, just think about if you needed to shoot everything in film.  “Big bucks you’ll spend,”  says Yoda.  You’ve gotta keep it in perspective.  As far as speed and failure of cards there is info that goes contra to some of Hoodman’s pedigree and you can read that here. [...]

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