Will I benefit from using very fast (> 30 MB/s) SD cards in a non-UHS enabled camera?

Question

Will I benefit from using a very fast SD card, such as this SanDisk Extreme Pro card, in my non-UHS enabled camera (a Pentax K-5)? I do not have any devices that can take advantage of UHS speeds. Will there be a performance advantage, even if small, from using such a card?

This is a more generalized version of this question: Can I get faster and cheaper results by buying the Sandisk Extreme, not the newer Pro?

Asked by DragonLord

Answer

A camera can only write out information so fast. So once you have a card that can be written to as fast as the camera can write out there is no benefit to getting a faster card. The I/O bottleneck is on the camera side. The only benefit you'll see is when it comes to reading off the card onto the computer. Whether that benefit is worth the cost difference is a personal decision.

Honestly, for me, I generally stick with slower cards. The camera buffer is large enough to handle short bursts and by the time I'm ready for another burst the card has had sufficient time to clear the buffer.

Answered by nwcs

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