Memory Cards, Part 1: CompactFlash From 8GB To 64GB

Lexar Professional 600x (16GB)

Lexar is part of the Micron group, selling all sorts of memory products, from memory cards to PC memory. We received a 16GB Professional 600x CF card for testing. A 32GB model is announced, but more diffciult to find. There's also an 8GB model. All of these come with a lifetime warranty.

The 600x model specifies sustained read and write throughput of 90 MB/s, which we could not reach in our testing. Our peak transfer speed was roughly 85 MB/s, and average performance was very near this level. Average performance is your key metric when you absolutely have to meet certain read performance requirements.

Write performance topped out at 82 MB/s with similar average throughput results. Minimum write performance came in at 59.2 MB/s. This is almost as good as SanDisk's card, but Lexar maintains the highest average results.

We also measured I/O performance. The Lexar card is clearly faster than hard drives in the file server and workstation tests, and it also delivers very impressive performance in the Web server test run. Clearly, most of these cards are designed to excel at reading small chunks of data.

Lexar offers an interesting add-on for its Professional 600x customers. You can download a free copy of Image Rescue 4 software for restoring accidentally deleted images. We found that the program works really well, as long as you don’t physically overwrite data.

Click “Start Scan” to search a CF card for deleted files that may still be functional.

The software actually found lots of photos that we took several years ago!

We were able to restore all of the pictures the Image Rescue 4 software found.