Flash Media: 1GB CompactFlash Roundup
by Purav Sanghani on December 23, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
Lexar's "Write Acceleration Technology" seems to have extended its performance past the supported digital cameras to our desktop flash memory card reader, while the Professional series card has performed the quickest out of 10 cards in the Real World test. However, SanDisk has also proven itself a worthy product by topping the HDTach charts in sequential read and write performance.
We, of course, knew that we'd be comparing apples to oranges by throwing 1x cards together with the higher performance 80x cards, so let's break them down by their manufacturer's specifications, real measured performance, and price.
After taking into consideration the selling price of each product, Transcend's 80x model provides enough performance to make it the first choice of high performance CompactFlash media. It comes second only to Lexar's flash card, but it is priced more than $20 lower. For the mid-performance cards, the EDGE brand CompactFlash media takes the gold as it performs the best out of the batch and is also competitively priced at about $60. For the lower end cards, the PQI model is priced a bit too high for the performance that it puts out. Viking's standard model gives us decent low end performance at a viable price of $53.99, which makes it a top "low-performance" pick.
There is, of course, a very large number of CompactFlash cards out there, which can fit into these categories. Unfortunately, we did not have a chance to look at them, so it's best to try a few different cards out before you settle for a single brand and model. Prices are also always changing due to supply and demand of flash memory chips. Therefore, it is very possible that Lexar's high performance card can catch up with Transcend and give it a run for its money.
Our overall pick would have to be Transcend's 80x card as it is priced at about $66; only $5 over the mid-performance EDGE card and just over $10 above our low performance Viking pick.
Lexar's "Write Acceleration Technology" seems to have extended its performance past the supported digital cameras to our desktop flash memory card reader, while the Professional series card has performed the quickest out of 10 cards in the Real World test. However, SanDisk has also proven itself a worthy product by topping the HDTach charts in sequential read and write performance.
We, of course, knew that we'd be comparing apples to oranges by throwing 1x cards together with the higher performance 80x cards, so let's break them down by their manufacturer's specifications, real measured performance, and price.
| Manufacturer's Specified Performance | Actual Performance | Price | |
| Lexar | High | High | $87.59 |
| PNY | High | Mid | $85.72 |
| Transcend | High | High | $65.95 |
| EDGE | Mid | Mid-High | $59.77 |
| RiData | Mid | Mid | ~$56 |
| Rosewill | Mid | Mid | $51.99 |
| SanDisk | Mid | Mid-High | $73.95 |
| Kingston | Low | Low | $49.99 |
| PQI | Low | Mid | $60.81 |
| Viking | Low | Mid | $53.99 |
After taking into consideration the selling price of each product, Transcend's 80x model provides enough performance to make it the first choice of high performance CompactFlash media. It comes second only to Lexar's flash card, but it is priced more than $20 lower. For the mid-performance cards, the EDGE brand CompactFlash media takes the gold as it performs the best out of the batch and is also competitively priced at about $60. For the lower end cards, the PQI model is priced a bit too high for the performance that it puts out. Viking's standard model gives us decent low end performance at a viable price of $53.99, which makes it a top "low-performance" pick.
There is, of course, a very large number of CompactFlash cards out there, which can fit into these categories. Unfortunately, we did not have a chance to look at them, so it's best to try a few different cards out before you settle for a single brand and model. Prices are also always changing due to supply and demand of flash memory chips. Therefore, it is very possible that Lexar's high performance card can catch up with Transcend and give it a run for its money.
Our overall pick would have to be Transcend's 80x card as it is priced at about $66; only $5 over the mid-performance EDGE card and just over $10 above our low performance Viking pick.
Special thanks to NewEgg for providing us with the CompactFlash cards for this review.
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macraig - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
Your research for the CF Roundup was incomplete: Pretec, a manufacturer with a history of producing higher-capacity CF media before anyone else, has been producing a 12GB CompactFlash card for some time now; it's also 80X media to boot. It will set you back as much as a complete gaming desktop system, of course; right now the MSRP is still $5000, but I think I saw it for $1700 somewhere. Pretec's two or three press releases about it were widely reported. A search in Google for "12gb cf" will educate you. Pretec also produces a 4GB SD card, greater capacity than anyone else AFAIK. I was surprised Pretec wasn't even included in the review.Mark Craig
mindless1 - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
The price-point for 12GB CF seems a bit unrealistic still for most uses.4GB SD are available from other brands now and at more normal price levels, between $250-300 to start. Key with these is the ability of the device using them to support the capacity and filesystem.
tygrus - Saturday, December 24, 2005 - link
Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year.artifex - Saturday, December 24, 2005 - link
Also, why not use an IDE to CF straight adapter?You don't know for sure that that device you're connecting in the middle can actually write at the max speed the card is capable of. A few years ago, Lexar was packing their own adapters in with their cards, saying people had to use them to get top speed. And that was back when top speed was 4, 8, 16x.
Glitchny - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
i know they cost like 2x as much as the ultra 2s however i ould have liked to see them included in the tests to see just how fast they arePauli - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this "Endurance Factor" pretty useless. It sounds to me like they're saying that, because a card is faster it will be written to more often and thus, not last as long. For digicam users this is not relevant; we will be writing to it the same number of times regardless of its speed -- I don't take more photos just because the CF speed is faster!AtaStrumf - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
I agree! Sure looks a bit too simple of a test to have any real value.If you're thinking of branching out, may I suggest Flash MP3 (+FM Tuner) Players, the cheap kind, not iPod Shuffle kind. I spent the entire last night going through tens of cheap ass "reviews", just to find out ... not much. Maybe I was just looking in all the wrong places, but not being a big portable music fan (buying a xmas gift), I just didn't know where to look and google wasn't terribly useful either and neither were forums.
I ended up buying a derivative of this here thingy:
http://www.s1mp3.org/en/index.php">http://www.s1mp3.org/en/index.php
I posted my review of it here:
http://users.volja.net/lukaakul/cny512-usb20.htm">http://users.volja.net/lukaakul/cny512-usb20.htm
[in slovene, but there are some nice pictures to look at, really]
In short, it's fine at playing MP3s (though to be honest, I didn't have anything to compare it to), but sloooooooooooooowwwwww at transferring files. That same old Full Vs. High speed USB 2.0 trick.
Ecmaster76 - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
I know typically most people with use USB card readers, but perhaps it might be worth testing with a IDE<->CF adapter to see if anything comes out differently.BTW Said adapters + 8GB CF rock if you want to make a truly silent, no moving parts computer...
highlandsun - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
Agreed. Actually I'd like to see a test using a notebook and a CF to PCMCIA adapter, since that was my primary interface. I hate USB adapters...BikeDude - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
Delkin has a CF to CardBus adapter that on my laptop delivers 10MB/s (reading Sandisk Extreme III cards). A PCMCIA adapter would only deliver a tenth of that speed... (granted, it costs significantly less, but its usefulness is limited on 1GB+ cards)--
Rune