Meet the Cards

These were the cards that I had available at the time of review, regrettable omissions include the Sandisk Ultra II and Extreme III cards, as well as the Lexar 80x WA cards, but those cards were not made available for review.

Sandisk 256MB

This is our smallest capacity card in our roundup. It is one of the newer Sandisk cards with the latest packaging.

Corsair 512MB 80x

This card carries with it the fastest rating of all the cards tested. Corsair is relatively new to the flash memory game, as compared to their contributions to high performance system ram, but with their reputation on the line, we expect good things.

Toshiba 512MB SD

I use this in my Tungsten T3, so I thought I would throw it in to test. On my tungsten, it takes forever to write to the card, it is so slow that I have had to take my Avantgo channels off the card to quicken my hotsync times.

PQI 1GB

PQI usually makes the sale flash memory at Fry’s. They have a new version that says high-speed, this is their original series.

Kingston Elite Pro 1GB

This is Kingston’s premium line of flash memory. No claims on what “x” rating is to be expected from this

Corsair 4GB

You can’t find a bigger solid-state compact flash card that can be backed up on a single layer DVD. Back in the day, the pros would recommend 512MB cards since you could backup in the field and burn off a CD-R so you would have multiple redundancy. Today, with DVD-R capability in the field, the 4GB size is perfect. When dual layer media drops in price, we’ll be recommending 8GB flash cards.

Notably, this card is rated differently from hard drive capacity, in that it truly is 4 gigabytes and not 4 billion bytes. Using the hard drive naming scheme, it would be a 4.2GB flash card. Other flash cards tested use the hard drive naming scheme

Interestingly, the font of the printing on a few of these cards is virtually identical with very similar model naming schemes.