Parallel storage to memory chips question.

[Jack MacD]

David,
Love the new forum. Thank you for starting it. I like your sections for S questions. You don't have a section yet called " dumb questions that can probably be answered by reading the S2 manual or watching Dale videos. If you did, I would post this question to that section now.

When I first obtained my S2 from you, I also bought 64gig CF cards. Given the files were not yet compressed, a 64 gig card was handy. I used the SD card slot as a back up once, but found parallel processing slowed the writing time. So I set it for sequential storage using the SD as an overflow back up.

Now with compressed files my 16 Gig SD is sometimes my preferred storage card if I am using a laptop in the field that has a SD slot but no FireWire for My CF reader.

The question is: is there a way to have the SD card written to first rather than the CF?

Incidentally, when I chose Parallel writing to cards, I no longer can even get both written to, even though it will write to the SD card if the CF card is not inserted. Not sure what I am doing wrong there. That's the dumb question.

[Mark Gowin]

Jack,

As I recall, the S2 has never performed parallel writes of the DNG to both CF card and SD card. I was shocked to discover that parallel write really meant it writes the DNG to the CF card and JPG to the SD card when you have the S2 set to DNG+JPG. If you have the S2 set to DNG only, then it doesn't write anything to the SD card until the CF card is full. If you want to write to the SD card first, then the only option is to leave the CF card out of the camera. I don't understand why Leica has not allowed true parallel writes of the DNG file. I understand that it could slow down the camera, but it would be nice to have the option so I can choose for myself whether I want a fast camera with no backup or a slow camera with a backup.

David, Josh, or others please correct me if I am wrong.

Mark

[David Farkas]

Jack,

As I recall, the S2 has never performed parallel writes of the DNG to both CF card and SD card. I was shocked to discover that parallel write really meant it writes the DNG to the CF card and JPG to the SD card when you have the S2 set to DNG+JPG. If you have the S2 set to DNG only, then it doesn't write anything to the SD card until the CF card is full. If you want to write to the SD card first, then the only option is to leave the CF card out of the camera. I don't understand why Leica has not allowed true parallel writes of the DNG file. I understand that it could slow down the camera, but it would be nice to have the option so I can choose for myself whether I want a fast camera with no backup or a slow camera with a backup.

David, Josh, or others please correct me if I am wrong.

Mark

Mark,

Your explanation is exactly right. No correction necessary.

I hope that Leica chooses to change the parallel option in firmware so that a DNG file can be written to both cards.

David

[Jack MacDonough]

Thanks folks,
Now I remember the parallel was with jpegs.
Someday a firmware update will do what makes sense.
Meantime, nice quick answer.