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GH5: SD Cards for 400MBPS


JordanWright
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If you're not shooting 400Mbps ALL-I with dual recording, I don't think you're adding anything to the discussion at all.

This is a follow-up on my experience with the Angelbird 128GB V90 card.

I bought the Panasonic 128GB V90 and Angelbird 128GB V90 SD cards. Both cards cost roughly $250.00 when I purchased them in Singapore a couple of months ago. To the best of my knowledge, the Panasonic retails for around $500 in North America, while the Angelbird has seen a price drop to $200 or so. My first Angelbird card failed on me, so I had to return it, which took almost exactly two weeks from the time I licked the postage stamp till the time the new one arrived at my door. The new one seemed to work. but I noticed it took much longer to copy the files to my hard drives than the Panasonic, so I decided to do a little experiment. I shot ten minutes of video (33GB) to both cards simultaneously and timed how long each one took to copy to a folder on my 2017 5K iMac. The Panasonic took 5 minutes 51 seconds, while the Angelbird took 6 minutes 2 seconds. Using Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test, the Angelbird measured 55.7MB/s write and 82.4MB/s read speeds, whereas the Panasonic measured 75.3MB/s write and 89.2MB/s read speeds. So given the unreliability of the Angelbird as well as its inferior performance/price ratio, I cannot in good conscience recommend it. Of course, many forum members have had success shooting 400Mbps ALL-I with other less expensive cards like Adata and Sandisk.

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Jon, by any chance, do you own 2 Panasonic 128GB v90 cards?  The rumor is Pansonic v90 cards are the only cards that are actually recognized as v90 cards on the GH5 and thus the only cards you can do backup recording at 400mbps.  Some SD card firmware programmer chimed in once at one of the GH5 facebook groups I visit.  He said it needs a special hard baked flag on the card which many v90 card manufacturers haven't adopted.  And since then, I've only talked to one person who have bought 2 Panasonic v90 cards to confirm this.  I've heard many people say that 2 Angelbird v90 or 2 ADATA v90 didn't allow backup recording at 400mbps.

My second curiosity is that, if Panasonic is willing to do that, are my 300MB/sec cards not being utilized by the GH5 in other ways?  If you have some time to spare, can you test if raw photos are written faster on a Panasonic v90 card versus another non-Panasonic 300MB/sec card?  The GH5 has the buffer for about 61-62 raw photos which will be written to my 2000x Lexar at about 100MB/sec.  Give or take 5MB/sec.  Would a Panasonic v90 card be able to clear the buffer faster?

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I think you guys are mixing up Megabits and Megabytes. 

Codecs are normally specified in Megabits - so the 400Mbit/s of the GH5 codec are actually only 50 MB/s. 

SDcard speeds are specified in Megabytes per second. So a 300MB/s card  (=2400 Mbit/s) is complete overkill for the GH5.

A run-of-the-mill 95MB/s Sandisk Extreme Pro will be more than sufficient for the camera. (Even the Sandisk Extreme with a read speed of 80MB/s and nominal write speed of 60MB/s should theoretically work, but should be tested first.)

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@cantsin No. V90 cards are required to be able to sustain a minimum sequential write speed of 90MB/s, but the Angelbird can only write 56MB/s or so according to Blackmagic. Whether that is overkill for the GH5 or not I can’t say, but I don’t buy cards just for today any more than I buy lenses for just one camera, and I would expect a $250 V90 card to work with any other cameras I might get in the future, even 8K.

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2 hours ago, cantsin said:

I think you guys are mixing up Megabits and Megabytes. 

Codecs are normally specified in Megabits - so the 400Mbit/s of the GH5 codec are actually only 50 MB/s. 

SDcard speeds are specified in Megabytes per second. So a 300MB/s card  (=2400 Mbit/s) is complete overkill for the GH5.

A run-of-the-mill 95MB/s Sandisk Extreme Pro will be more than sufficient for the camera. (Even the Sandisk Extreme with a read speed of 80MB/s and nominal write speed of 60MB/s should theoretically work, but should be tested first.)

 

Everyone here I imagine would know the difference.  But it sounds like you don't know the quirks of the GH5?  All UHS-I cards labeled 95MB/sec, even the best ones, won't sustain at 400mbits/sec (50MB/sec) on the GH5 because Panasonic has made it that way.  Panasonic also has set an arbitrary restriction that it won't do dual (redundant) 400mbits/sec recording on UHS-II cards unless it identifies itself as a v90 card.  So the Sandisk 300MB/sec UHS-II card will do 400mbps on a single card, but if you have 2 of these cards on the GH5, it won't do dual (redundant) recording because the SanDisk 300MB/sec not seeing it as a v90 card.  

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