Conclusion: Kingston Wins
So which is the best of them all? It clearly depends on what you want to do with your new CompactFlash card. The best product for photographers is the Kingston Ultimate 266X, which is the product that maintains the highest average and minimum write throughput, while delivering the highest read throughput as well. It also shows balanced I/O performance and comes with a downloadable recovery solution, which is why we clearly recommend this product.
Many Second Places
However, the other products aren’t far behind, and many of them are suitable as alternatives should you get a better deal than what is possible for the Kingston Ultimate cards. The most important decision is to define the desired application.
Lexar’s Professional delivers fast and balanced read and write throughput, but other SLC flash cards deliver better I/O performance. Silicon Power and the Transcend Ultra Speed do well if you can live with average write performance, but they fail on I/O performance, if that matters to you. This is the case if you’re looking for a fast card to use as a storage device for system installations on industrial solutions or similar. In that case, Transcend’s Extreme Speed is great if you can live with average throughput.
