I'm unsure if I should buy a CF-SD adapter for my camera (replacing one that just died) or a CF-PCI adapter for my laptop and a new CF card. Can anyone share any experiences or recommendations that might push me one way or the other?
When I got my 30D a year ago, instead of buying a large CF card I bought a CF-SD adapter (allowing me to use SD cards in my 30D) so I could use one of my many SD cards with my camera. Today (thankfully it was immediately after a photo trip rather than immediately before it) the adapter stopped working: the SD card I normally use, as well as another one, leave the card-access light on and ignore shutter presses for quite a while (in the 30-60 seconds range) and sometimes give an error on shutter press or Format Card (I think I've seen both 'CF Err' and 'Err 99', but I didn't write down the actual errors), while my backup 512MB CF card works just fine and my laptop has no problems reading the SD cards. I can only conclude that my CF-SD adapter has died.
I had bought the CF-SD adapter because I have many SD cards, and they're generally cheaper than CF cards (at least, I believed that to be true one year ago), and because I have an SD reader in my laptop (so SD cards are much more convenient to read). Now that the adapter has died (and I got almost a full year's use out of it, for under $20, so I'm certainly happy with it), I'm wondering again if I should get another CF-SD adapter or a large, fast CF card and a CF-PCI adapter that I can put in my laptop's PCI Express slot.
The CF-SD adapter is a little cheaper and I have plenty of SD cards around and would need to buy at least one CF card, so the CF-SD adapter wins on price; but when I did my original testing in-camera I found that the CF-SD adapter was considerably slower than the CF card (if only an issue in burst mode when taking 10+ pictures), so the CF-PCI adapter wins on speed. And I have experience with the CF-SD adapter but not with the CF-PCI adapter, so there's the "known quantity" factor there. And obviously this decision will have some impact on the "Should I buy a 7D or 60D?" question that I will have to answer at some point in the future. In case it matters, I run Linux, but the reviews I've read of CF-PCI adapters seem to indicate that won't matter.
Answer
I found myself in the same boat about a year ago, and I considered picking up an SD-to-CF adapter to use SD cards in my camera. All the research I did, however, showed really spotty results for these adapters, so I bagged that idea and bought a couple CF cards and a USB card reader for the CF cards.
The ultimate driver for me was reliability. At the end of the day, the last thing I need is drama from my memory card while I'm trying to shoot a picture.
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