128gb SDXC cards 2 (1 of 1)

I’ve been testing out that Komputerbay 128GB SDXC card with the Panasonic GH4 over the last 3 or 4 days and I haven’t run into any problems with write speeds. Even at 1080p 200Mbit/s the card seems to sail along without any trouble. No dropouts or write issues so far, I might even approve it for paid work if it makes it through a few more weeks of road testing.

1gb 128GB SDXC

As promised here are speed tests from CrystalDiskMark. The rest of the information is nice to have but for video work Sequential read and write speeds are what you’ll want to focus on. The advertised speed for the Komputerbay 128GB SDXC card is “60MB/s Write, 90MB/s Read”. As you can see from the results, the read speeds fall a little short of the mark coming in at 76.76 MB/s. However the write speeds for this card seem to be “write” (pun intended) on target at 64.20 MB/s which slightly faster than advertised. 

Sandisk extreme pro 32GB speed test

Compare those results to the results (above) from the Sandisk Extreme pro 32GB card and you’ll see that the Komputerbay 128GB SDXC card results are pretty close. The Extreme pro is slightly faster in both reads and writes but both cards are more than fast enough to keep up with the GH4.

Where the Komputerbay 128GB SDXC card really pulls head is in price per GB. A Sandisk Extreme pro 32GB card will set you back about $50 which works out to $1.56 per GB. At $64.50 the Komputerbay 128GB SDXC card works out to 50 cents a GB, that’s 1/3 the price of Sandisk’s offering.

Keep in mind that the Komputerbay CF cards I’ve tested in the past have been a little bit unpredictable from card to card. Some people have reported speed differences as high as 20% from one card to another. This is the first and only Komputerbay SDXC card I’ve owned so I don’t have a very large sample size. From the Amazon reviews I’ve read, it seems like the SDXC cards might suffer from the same quality control issues. About 14% of the reviews are negative out of 1350 total. So make sure you check your card speeds as soon as it shows up.

The other thing to note is that with a large capacity card like this, you are putting all of your eggs in a single basket. If you shoot on 32GB cards, all 4 cards (128GB worth) would have to fail for a shoot to be a total loss. However a problem with a single 128GB card may cause you to lose everything. In the old days I feared using anything over 32GB for that reason, but the hassle of changing out cards every 45min or so has me rethinking that strategy.

Once I’ve had a chance to use the card for a month or two, i’ll let you know how well it works out. So far so good.

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