Roundup: CompactFlash Cards For Professionals

Benchmarks: Throughput

Although there are differences in read performance, these are probably only interesting if you need to minimize the time required to copy data from the memory cards to a system. In such a case, the Kingston Ultimate or Lexar Professional cards would give you a noticeable head start over a Transcend Extreme Speed or SanDisk’s Extreme Ducati Edition. However, photographers will want to have a look at write performance.

While read throughput varied between 47 and 39 MB/s, write performance is between 42 and 32.8 MB/s, and it shows much lower minimum values. Keep in mind that we use the hard drive benchmark h2benchw to test throughput, which means that it does sequential testing across the entire storage area. This may not reflect typical applications where your SLR camera saves individual photos; in that case, you can look at the maximum or average speed. But it helps to reveal weaknesses when you want a certain, sustained write performance for continuous photo shooting in the RAW or RAW+JPEG formats. SanDisk’s Extreme Ducati Edition and the Kingston Ultimate are the best when it comes to delivering fast writes.