Archives for November 2012

Lexar 1000x and SanDisk Extreme Pro

November 13, 2012 by

Just got a bunch of new cards from B&H for my 5D Mark III (and in preparation for the upcoming 6D). The set consists of two 32GB Lexar Professional 1000x CompactFlash cards and two 32GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDHC cards. The Lexars will replace the 16GB SanDisk Extreme Pro and a bunch of 8GB Extreme IVs I used in the 5D3 since I bought the camera (actually the Extreme Pro will remain in use, as “emergency” storage).

Here are my initial observations.

Man, these Lexars are blazing fast! I can shoot god-knows-how-much frames before the camera starts to slow down. Then the buffer is emptied to the card in just a few seconds after I release the shutter. They are noticeably faster than the SanDisk Extreme Pro was. This is the speed I always wanted to have!

Forget about using SD cards in the 5D Mark III, however. They are that slow. I have a 32GB SanDisk in the SD slot for situations when I don’t have time to fiddle with swapping the CF (think action). I hope the the 6D will drive these cards faster.

Btw, you can find some numbers on the performance of these cards in Rob Galbraith’s now abandoned CF/SD performance database. According to his measurements the Lexar is 36% faster than the SanDisk Extreme Pro I used. My observations are completely in line with these numbers.

So if you have a 5D3, then these Lexars are the way to go, period. And B&H has an attractive price tag on the 2-Pack.

Filed Under: Photo Equipment Tagged With: , , , , ,

Hibernate File Issue with MacBook 2012 Update

November 9, 2012 by

Seems that the list of annoyances I have to deal with after each and every OS X update just grown a bit. Besides the usual

chflags nohidden ~/Library

command that unhides the Library folder, now I have to do some extra work to reclaim the space normally occupied by the hibernate file (/var/vm/sleepimage). I do not use hibernation on my notebooks. I shut them down when I finished. I prefer to start with clean state on every boot, but equally I’m not fond of wasting 17 gigabytes of expensive SSD space on a file that I never use.

In the past you could turn off hibernation with

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

But after today’s release of “Update 2.0 for all Mac notebooks introduced in June 2012”, I had to do some extra work. The issue is: regardless of the state of the hibernatemode switch, the hibernate file (stored in /var/vm/sleepimage) is recreated on every boot. Bummer.

Fortunately you can also set the location of the file, so all I had to do is to send it into a black hole:

sudo pmset -a hibernatefile /dev/null

Everything works fine with this setup, but I fear that the next update could bring some more surprises…

Filed Under: Operating Systems Tagged With: ,