Benchmark Results: Throughput
The fastest CF card comes from Silicon Image, delivering more than 90 MB/s—a new record. Most of the other cards follow closely behind, including Transcend and Lexar. Samsung was clearly slower, and SanDisk struggled in reads.
Lexar and SanDisk dominate by maintaining the highest minimum write transfer rates. These numbers are key if you want to sustain continuous raw photo shooting for more than a few seconds. Lexar, Silicon Power, and Transcend provide better maximum and average results, but the minumum write transfer rates sometimes suffer, especially for Silicon Power.
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I am rather impressed that these little chips have this much throughput.
Just a request, but, how about comparing a average SD, microSD, SDD and HDD just for a reference point?
What kind of CF reader did you use for these benchmarks?
Windows Vista? Haven't you heard Windows 7 is out?
Lexar seems to be the overall winner for sure. I'd definitely be buying that. I'm currently a SanDisk using for my pro work, but Lexar sure looks good in this category. Congrats to Transcend for putting up a good showing. They provide great value. Good article. As anamaniac pointed out, what device did you use for the reader?
The only speed metric that really matters is when the card is in the camera and the camera is writing sequentially to it. They aren't commonly used for random access and if you are reading from them you are probably limited by the reader or something else along the USB path. I have 4 different card readers and their performance varies widely.
The speed and price of these is very unimpressive compared to current SSD's, but they are a bit smaller. However if you need to shoot raw at high framerates then there aren't any other options.
Interesting recommendation for professional photography.
I forgot to put this in my previous post...
A good test of these cards would be to get a DSLR, put the card in it, set it on raw and continuous and start timing. If possible you guys should add a test like this to your review.
Lol, can't wait for 5 years to pass so I can pick up a 64GB CF for £20.
Windows Vista? Haven't you heard Windows 7 is out?
LoL. But seriously, they use Vista because its their standard testing environment. It would be unscientific to move to Windows 7, and compare the new results to anything they test on Vista. And I doubt they still have half the cards they tested on Vista to retest on 7, if they even wanted to do that.
I mean, unless you know something about how Vista handles these CF cards, and can give a compelling technical reason to move to Vista?
Good to know that nothing is spared any mercy when it comes to benchmarking it here. I must say I was surprised to see Samsung's offering readily exceeding its rated speed of x233, which'd work out to about 35MB/sec. Instead, for reads we see it tearing things up an nearly hitting 50MB/sec.
And yes, I'll give another second on wanting to know what reader is used... And perhaps better yet, I wonder if Tom's might follow this up with another review of flash card readers?
What kind of card reader were used for the tests?
If it was USB can you repeat the tests using Firewire?
Why are there no SATA card readers on the market?
(Only Addonics makes one as far as I know and very expensive here in Europe)
Windows Vista? Haven't you heard Windows 7 is out?
Windows 7 still has a very small market share (10%) compared to Vista (20%). If anything they should have tested these cards on Win XP as it still has the highest market share (60-70%).