Roundup: CompactFlash Cards For Professionals

Lexar Platinum II And Professional

Lexar Platinum II 80X (16 GB)

The Platinum II, also known as Lexar Premium II cards, are rated at 80X speeds, which equates to 12 MB/s. This may apply to certain capacity points within the available 2, 4, 8, and 16 GB models, but it wasn’t the actual maximum in the case of our 16 GB test sample: we measured 38-43 MB/s read throughput and 20-32.8 MB/s for sequential writes. That’s really much more than expected, but again, you should not expect the same performance for smaller models.

Like Kingston, Lexar bundles a downloadable program called Image Rescue 3, which comes to your aid if you accidentally delete data on your Platinum II memory card.

We noticed that either the controller or flash memory type of the Platinum II card must be different from those of the Professional UDMA types, as the I/O performance was much lower. The Professional series provides two to three times more I/O operations per second than the Platinum II.

Lexar Professional UDMA 300X (16 GB)

The second Lexar test sample was a 16 GB Professional UDMA card, rated at an impressive 300X speed. This is equal to a 45 MB/s throughput, and Lexar even guarantees it for write operations. We found that the maximum throughput of the Professional UDMA card was 46.4 MB/s, which applies to read throughput.

Sequential writes, however, maxed out at 41.3 MB/s. Minimum and average write throughput was even below that, which means that the card doesn’t deliver the promise on its box. Yet it is still one of the top three CF cards on the market when it comes to throughput, and it is average in terms of I/O operations per second.

Check prices for Lexar's Platinum II 80X 16 GB