CF Adapter with SD card instead of CF card

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hi folks,

has anyone tried using a CF-to-SD adapter instead of a CF card? My rationale here is that

a) SD cards are a little cheaper
b) it might be possible to exchange cards with the adapter in place, avoiding the risk of bending the pins

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Hans

#2

This idea came up before but I think the difficulty is finding an adapter that allows you to rear-load the sd card. Most CF adapters I’ve seen are unfortunately side loading, so you still have the same ‘pin risk’ when loading/unloading the sd card.

#3

Speed might be an issue. the OT minimum is 133x CF cards which is 20MB/s. SD class 10 cards are 10MB/s. I’m seeing on wiki that there is a new class called UHS Class 3 cards which do 30MB/s but then you need to make sure you get a CF adapter that can handle the new speed as well.

Also keep in mind most if not all SD card will be a single flash chip where a CF card has enough room to be multiple chips. More chips means higher R/W parallelism. So the UHS class 3 might be peak 30MB/s speed and not continuous due to internal bandwidth limitations.

I’m not sure price wise SD cards are worth it. If you are in the U.S. then check out newegg.com or microcenter.com for CF card prices. You can get some big fast ones for a reasonable price.

#4

Thanks. Doesn’t Look like it’s worth the hassle. I guess I’ll just get a 64GB CF and leave it. in the slot.