SanDisk Ultra II or Extreme III for wildlife shots?

Do you think it is worth an extra $15 bucks for a 2.0gb card for the Extreme III? Will the quicker capture matter enough if I am shooting raw with a D70? I will be shooting wildlife primarily with it.

Thanks,

Don Gorczynski

I just bought my first Sandisk card 3 days ago, a 4GB Extreme III. So far, I'm very disappointed. I shot 56 images the first afternoon. I transferred the images onto my Hyperdrive 80 at the end of the day, just as always. When I got home they wouldn't upload from my Hyperdrive unit. I retried several times. I was able to upload them from the card itself, but it took FOREVER to complete the transfer. Literally, it took in the neighborhood of 30 minutes to upload 56 images! To top it off, 3 of the images were corrupt.

I reformatted the card and my Hyperdrive unit, and went out again yesterday. Same thing once again. No images would upload from my Hyperdrive unit to my computer. It took almost 1:15 to upload directly from the card.

I've always heard great things about Sandisk, so I don't know if I just got a bad card or what, but I don't think I'll be buying any more of them. I've always used Delkin Pro 4GB in the past with good results. They're only 45x cards I believe as compared to the faster speed of Sandisk, but the speed of Sandisk has been a complete fallacy so far in my case.

Bill I've never had problems with my Sandisk CF cards, but I had problems with two HyperDrive units. I would be more prone to believe that your HyperDrive is the problem not the Sandisk CF cards.

Bill, if you're connecting your card and/or your Hyperdrive unit through some USB port, then I wonder if you're using older USB interfaces. USB 1.1 is notoriously slow at about 1.5MB/s, and if you're connecting through human interface devices likey keyboard and mouse hubs, then it's even slower at 180KB/s (which fits almost exactly with your numbers - 56 images copied in 30 minutes or 1800 seconds, at an assumed size of about 7MB per image).

On a standard CF-II slot I have on my laptop, I can copy at about 10MB/s directly from the Extreme-III card, but here the limitation is the speed of my laptop hard drive and not the card.

Donald, if I were you, I wouldn't hold back the 15$ and go for the Extreme-III. In any circumstance, it will atleast give me more leeway in the types of temperatures and weather conditions you can shoot.

I've been using a Sandisk Extreme III 4GB card and have no complaints. I just got an 8GB Extreme III card a week ago and it appears to fine also. I was frustrated by the slow transfer speed when uploading to my computer and had to get a USB 2 card and a USB 2 card reader to get acceptable speed. The first USB 2 card reader I bought was a Sandisk and it was defective, but replacing it was all that was needed.

I've read that there are counterfeit Sandisk cards on the market that don't perform up to specs. ???

Hi Jim and Ashutosh - No, the problem doesn't seem to be with the Hyperdrive - it works well with my Delkin cards; only has an issue with the Sandisk. Also, my USB is USB2. Normally, a full upload (200+ images} only takes about 10-12 minutes for my slower Delkin cards using the Hyperdrive. I will contact Sandisk tomorrow to see about swapping out the card for another before I give up on Sandisk altogether. I know they're a very reputable company, I'm just assuming I got a dud somehow. I bought it through B&H, so I feel sure sure it's not a counterfeit card either.