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Lexar Platinum II and Professional

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2:00 AM - 02/17/2009 by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos

Lexar Platinum II SDHC, 16 GB

Lexar has 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB versions of its Platinum II SDHC series. The company says that these cards are ideal for HD video and fast-action photos, which our benchmark results confirm: we saw up to 15.5 MB/s read throughput and up to 10.7 MB/s writes. The Platinum II cards are rated at Class 4 level or at 60X, which equals 9 MB/s. The card comes with a free copy of a program called Image Rescue 3, which can help to restore data on a memory card if it is accidentally deleted.

Lexar Professional SDHC, 8 GB

Although “Platinum” already sounds pretty high end, the real high-end series by Lexar is called the Professional SDHC series—don’t confuse it with the Professional 133x, which is the SD 2.1 model with a maximum capacity of 2 GB. The Professional SDHC is available at 4 GB and 8 GB capacities, also rated at 133x speed and Class 6. In fact this is the fastest SDHC card in this roundup, reaching 18.6 MB/s write throughput and 19.7 MB/s read transfer rate.

This is also one of the fastest cards (if not the fastest) in our IOmeter I/O testing. This is not relevant for those who intend to use the card as a storage device, but running applications or even an operating system off the memory card requires the ability to perform a large number of I/O operations per second. Lexar does the best here.

Details are available on the Lexar Web site.

Talkback
joeman42 02/17/2009 8:27 AM
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Correction:

Though the original SD spec was defined for 2.0 GB and under, there are 4.0 GB SD (not SDHC) cards available. These should be mentioned for older devices manufactured prior to the revised spec, and most current GPS units. Though they are not universally compatible with older equipment (you pretty much have to gamble on one to see if it works), they do present a possible option for older gear.

hustler539 02/17/2009 9:09 AM
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Well written article and very informative. Now I know what to look for when purchasing my next sd.....I hate waiting on the camera to store a picture when I want to take the next shot!

Anonymous 02/17/2009 10:40 AM
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I'm looking for SDHC card but this article is absolutely confusing. I was looking for the Silicon Power results but there are a lot of mistakes or mistyping in the article. On some of the I/O meter charts it's line is light gray on some other it is dark grey. On some pages there is the 16GB listed, on some other there is the 32GB version. Due to all these mistakes this article became absolutely confusing and unreliable!

aapocketz 02/17/2009 4:17 PM
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Quote :On some of the I/O meter charts it's line is light gray on some other it is dark grey


that IO meter plot is very hard to read, even when zooming in using firefox on a dell 3007wfp-hc

robert17 02/17/2009 4:48 PM
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As usual, a well written and informative article from the Pros at Toms. Thank you.

Anonymous 02/17/2009 6:04 PM
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Bought the transcend 16gb yesterday for $33 looks like I didn't do to badly, I'm happy with 15mb/s read and I bet it does faster than 19.7 read with a quicker reader.

Deliriou5 02/17/2009 6:13 PM
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What about a price/GB chart or a price/performatnce chart? If one is 3% faster, but costs 40% more, that's a "no deal".

Igot1forya 02/17/2009 6:21 PM
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I really think someone should come out with an external RAID array for these things. You can fit a bunch of these in a very small space, and if you stack the performance/capacity in parallel you could potentially get some amazing numbers. Make one massive RAID50!

one-shot 02/17/2009 6:21 PM
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If you use a d-SLR, the speed is well worth the price. I have a 266X Transcend Compact Flash card and it works great. The bottleneck is my camera's buffer and not the memory card when shooting RAW or RAW+JPEG.

Shadow703793 02/17/2009 11:45 PM
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Welldone! I was looking for something like this. Quite useful.

Shadow703793 02/17/2009 11:47 PM
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one-shot :
If you use a d-SLR, the speed is well worth the price. I have a 266X Transcend Compact Flash card and it works great. The bottleneck is my camera's buffer and not the memory card when shooting RAW or RAW+JPEG.


Agreed! Not to mention with increasing resolutions for DSLR you need faster and bigger cards.

ram1009 02/18/2009 12:07 PM
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IMHO, reviews like this aren't much good without a cost comparison. Bang for the buck and all that.

angry_ducky 02/18/2009 12:35 PM
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I'm so glad I found this article; I just bought a Nikon D60 digital SLR, and have no idea what memory card to get for it. I want something with fast writes, as the camera can shoot up to 3 MB/s, but I don't care how long it takes to transfer pictures to the computer.

While I have a digital camera, I normally use a 28-year old Minolta SLR, as well as a Holga and other film cameras, so memory cards and lens systems are very confusing to me.

Darkk 02/18/2009 5:12 AM
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Sandisk SD cards always worked well for me. Even their 4GB Ultra II model works great in my Canon camera. Not the fastest but it's fast enough for my needs at a low price point and not one of them ever failed on me.

Costco usually carries em at decent prices.

Anonymous 02/18/2009 11:19 PM
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Well I use a SDHC 4gb from Veho, which is class 6 and excellent..But really it is a *lot* about bang fer Buck. The card was as cheap as other lower rated cards .. so why not? I would like to see the use of these as storage and storage extenders on all manner of devices explored. I use mine as a surrogate blank DVD. A Cheap 32gb would be lovely..

matjazz 02/20/2009 1:44 PM
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I'd like to add that Transcend 150x is probably the only one with SLC memory. Advantage over MLC is that SLC can handle 10x more read/write cycles is more reliable in low temperatures. If you look up the price of Transcend 150x SDHC cards you'll see that they cost somewhat twice as much per GB as regular SDHC class 6. Here's what I found on SLC vs MLC whitpaper from Super Talent:
"Single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) Flash memory are similar in their design. MLC Flash devices cost less and allow for higher storage density. SLC Flash devices provide faster write performance and greater reliability, even at temperatures above the operating range of MLC Flash devices"

bfrazier 02/24/2009 8:08 PM
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I would have appreciated some discussion about the speed of CF relative to Flash Memory Camcorders such as the Canon FS Series. Isn't that where consumers really need the faster cards anyways?

ppj 02/27/2009 8:55 PM
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Silicon Power SDHC class 6 is excellent choice for movie recorders. You might have noted that camcorders are moving towards flash memory for movie recording and to record the high resolution HD movies at real time speed, high speed cards are required, and high speed SDHC silicon power memory cards to my opinion is really a good choice.

Anonymous 03/17/2009 12:01 PM
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Great article but it is lacking. You mentioned but didn't list the OCZ Gold Series, the Extreme III 30MB series or the Sandisk VideoHD series of cards all of which are options I think need to be addressed.

Anonymous 05/23/2009 3:36 AM
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Should retest with a faster card reader ... SanDisk ImageMate Multi-Card Reader ... 30MB max.


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