13 SDHC Memory Cards Reviewed

Lexar Platinum II and Professional

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.