you always bring that up but it's moot. the lifetime warranty is simple "should it fail" not cycle based. if the card crashes they'll recover it and you get a brand spankin new one. after 1 year and if you do get a failure on th MD what you get is something to help level that uneven table leg at home. that is should it occur.

As I read the various forums and comments on CF cards, it is obvious that different cards are faster in different cameras and some with greater speeds don't work as fast in some cameras. Sooooo.... Lexar is what came with the Nikon 5000. If I get the Lexar 32X WM, will it be as fast as the camera is capable? If so that card seems to take me into the future a bit in case I update later. The pictures I'm getting are awesome. I knew when I bought the camera, that it was old technology, but at $483 brand new with a 4 year replacement guarantee, I couldn't pass it up. I'm printing 13x19" photos to a quality which is great. The speed is my only complaint. But I'm using ScanDisk 4x 128mb cards which others have said crawl instead of walk. I know most anything I buy will be faster, but I'm trying to get advice from those in the know, so I don't waste any money. A friend of mine has an IBM Micro drive 340mb. He has offered to let me try it.

How many times faster will the battery go with a drive over a CF approximately?

I don't think the $75 dollars difference between a CF and MD is a significant amount to sway my decision, but speed is. If I'm reading you guys right the speed of a fast 32x card and a micro drive in write mode would be the same. Is that a correct assumption?

Thanks for all your help guys.

as far as the write speeds you got it right on.

power drain- maybe, sorta, woulda, coulda, might be in the realm of 10% or more on a MD and your camera settings. it's all relative. the initial spin ups from start/sleep and writes are the highest draws.

a 340 is of a 1st generation design- efficiency is not nearly as good as the 1GB.

as far as what came in the box with the camera- nikon sells that space to whoever. in euope i believe you get a sandisk. thats comarketing and brand recognition at its best. i'm just playing devils advocate on that one.

Actually the 340Mb use slighly more power, but is faster @ startup than the 1G. You'll notice this with some cameras that the drive is ready before it takes the time for the camera to intialize. Most of the current surges occur when the microdrive is writing, the rest of the time it goes into the idle mode and save on the battery.

Your mileage varies: for example I can almost fill the entire microdrive in an hour with one set of battery in the studio (using an external strobe for sync), or I need 2-3 sets of battery to accomplish the same feat in a 12hr period...

Another thing to consider is with the larger capacity of the microdrive you'll be just storing pictures(ie keep everything for later use) instead of reviewing and deleting pictures on the smaller cards which actually drain the battery more, since the camera processor has to do all the work. ops: Also remember with flashes the device can not erase one location, but an entire block has to be erased and rewritten (hence the write cycles multiply very quickly, all done by the internal controller unaware by the end-user)!

You aren't going to believe this...

ScanDisk 4x 128mb CF = 1 minute 20 seconds / 15mb
IBM Micro Drive 340mb = 4 minutes /15mb

I'm buying a CF card thank you. I don't have an explanation, but I know the results.

This is definetly interesting, either you have a lemon or the 5700 does not like the microdrive!

As a reference on the D7:
IBM Micro Drive 340mb = 17.48s/14.1mb
IBM Micro Drive 1Gb = 16.38s/14.1mb

... 15Mb in 4 minutes is like 67kb/s nowhere near it's rated speed! Actually sjms can you check with the D7Hi, but it seems like there's only 4 second difference between raw vs tiff (It's pretty amazing @ only ~.90Mb/s for the D7's write)

A thought occured to me that I had not formatted the drive. I will go home tonight and format the MD and see if that makes a difference.

The guy who loaned it to me had a Canon SLR type digital. This may be totally my fault, but if formatting doesn't work then it is my Nikon 5000 that is bulking at the idea of an MD.

format it in the camera

I don't think it'll make a lot of difference... My 340Mb microdrive came right from an MP3 player full of music files (the files can co-exist), and it's only slightly slower than the 1G because of an older design.

BTW, why are you using tiff instead of raw. The picture files are smaller in the raw mode (is faster writes), and also preserve the full 12-bit of color instead of tiff, and unprocessed by the camera... This will leave you more leeway in post-process. 8)

In raw the writes are only ~12s, I can't see anyone waiting 1m20s between shots!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:

Formatting the drive reduced the time from 4:00 minutes to :40 seconds. A dramatic and refreshing difference. That is half the time of a 4x Scan Disk CF. I think I'm going to get a CF card after gingerly taking care of my friends MD and making sure nothing happened to it. I take my CF card out a lot to put it in the card reader and pop a picture onto the computer to e-mail somewhere. Thanks guys for all your help and advice. This really helped.