In the past, I usually buy the fastest card they sell. Usually this means the most expensive card, and the top-of-the-line model, so reliability is unquestioned. Since buying these, I've never had a card failure or performance issues *knock on wood*. My conclusion is: to make a fast card, they need excellent drive logic (controller, high quality memory chips, etc.) which makes for a more reliable memory card. I have had cheaper cards fail.

Now I'm looking for a bigger CF card to use, 64GB cards or maybe the 128GB card (does the D700 even support this?), but the speeds are going out there! (I see some going 150MB/s) I know my D700 doesn't write that fast and my card readers, even though UDMA capable aren't able to keep up.

If I want the best reliability, should I still be going for the best (and therefore fastest) cards on the market? Or are they just sort of leveling out in terms of reliability?

In case you're wondering about speed, I'm the spray and pray type

Only reason I can see for buying the fastest flash cards for a D700 is for compatibility with any planned future camera purchases (e.g. D800).

As with faster cars, the fastest, highest capacity cards may be pushing the boundaries and bouncing off the end-stops of real world physics. IMHO the latest fastest cards may not be more reliable or better for ordinary purposes than last year's 'best buy'.

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

I guess I should look at older cards. I haven't shopped for a new memory card since I bought my D700.

Call me cheap, but I always buy the least expensive Sandisk cards (largest I have is 8 gig), and I've never had a problem in either D700 I have. I've had the first body since 2009. I've never had a problem with write speed shooting high school sports. Granted, I don't "machine gun". I still shoot the way I did when shooting film-shoot at the decisive moment.

Sam

A Georgia Nikonian

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Hi Ran,

The D700 can write 41.9MB/s Raw or 33.3MB/s Jpeg to a 1000X 32GB card even though the card is rated at 150MB/s. It will write at about half that speed to a 45MB/s card.
I have never had a problem with Sandisk mid or high end cards.
Lexar and Hoodman also have excellent reputations for building reliable cards.
Good Luck and Enjoy your Nikons!

Best Regards,
Marty

In my opinion you've drawn the wrong conclusion. All of the quality cards (I have SanDisk, Lexar and Kingston) are and have been quite reliable. Investing for the future in SD/CF cards is futile: the prices drop faster than the cameras consume them. Had I bought the fastest available when I got my last camera, I'd have paid about 6x as much as I have, and moreover even if had a D4 now, they wouldn't have been fast enough. So I buy the cheapest available at a reasonable write speed, and put the rest of the money aside for the next one. I have SanDisk 30MB/sec cards of various types - mostly 32GB - and don't have either reliability or performance issues. In theory I'm limited by the cards to less than the ability of the camera, but I have probably filled the buffer on my camera a half dozen times in the past 2-3 years, so the limit isn't hurting me much on a D3. I barely ever change cards with a 32GB - that's about 1250 frames in lossless compressed 14-bit raw per card.

I'm told that I'm the non-thinking spray and pray type too - I can easily shoot 4000-4500 frames in a weekend of motorsport, although usually at a baseball game I probably shoot only 600-700 and for landscape or macro it's more like 1 frame per minute.

_____
Brian... a bicoastal Nikonian and Team Member

My gallery is online. Comments and critique welcomed any time!