Roundup: CompactFlash Cards For Professionals

Benchmarks: Access Time, I/O Performance

We only added the access time results for the sake of completeness. They are not relevant in everyday life, and they don’t correlate with the I/O performance results either.

If you throw typical file server access at the memory cards, you will see the Transcend Extreme Speed 300X 8 GB card winning by a clear margin. A figure of 240 I/O operations per second is more than any conventional desktop hard drive can deliver; it actually matches the I/O performance of a 15,000 RPM Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450 hard drive.

The Web server benchmark requests only very small chunks of data, and it purely consists of read operations, which has most of the drives perform at a comparable level. All of these CF cards are much faster than hard drives at this type of workload.

The workstation test is mostly relevant for desktop and workstation applications. Again, the Transcend Extreme Speed 300X dominates, followed by the PNY Optima Pro and San Disk’s Extreme Ducati Edition. The Lexar Platinum II, Transcend Ultra Speed and Silicon Power Professional are all based on MLC flash memory, which is why they don’t perform well here. They do much better when it comes to throughput, as you can see on the next page.