Speed Reading: A Quick Look at Compact Flash Performance

Conclusion

There is a difference between the cheap flash readers and the name brand ones. You don’t really save that much money by skimping, so we recommend going with a slightly more expensive card readers – the Dazzle and Sandisk both performed very well – and caution against the free after rebate specials. We had hoped to be able to whole heartedly recommend the Lexar firewire reader, but cannot do so based upon our compatibility testing, although with a compatible card, it is the fastest reader. It may be the right choice for you, but be sure that you buy the reader at a store where you can return it.

More surprising is that the read performance of these flash cards isn’t too different. It may be because of the limitations of our card readers or equipment. Looking at Rob Galbraith’s testing, we see that most cards are pretty similar in speed, until you get to the Sandisk Ultra II or Extreme series, or the write accelerated Lexar cards, as with everything there is a bell curve distribution. One thing to note that with extensive use of these cards in a Canon 20D, Canon Digital Rebel, and Canon D30, we never experienced any lost images that have been reported with the Lexar cards.

Unfortunately, we did not see much correlation in the advertised read speeds of the cards and their performance in the readers, with good performance all around. A word of caution regarding 40x vs 60x vs 80x cards, some manufacturers define 1x at 150kb/s, others as 176kb/s. We got real world read tests of around 40x on all of our cards, I would say that this is pretty impressive. The newest Sandisk Extreme cards will support a new method for reading that is available on Sandisk readers with the “ESP” logo on the box. The model numbers for the improved readers and old readers are the same.

Based upon these results, taken in context with the previous publications on this matter, we would recommend choosing cards based upon capacity rather than advertised performance, unless you are getting the substantially more expensive Sandisk UItra II, Extreme, or write accelerated Lexar cards. We were hoping that the Corsair 80x and the Kingston Elite Pro would be better performers. In our informal write tests on the Canon 20D, we did not see a palpable increase in performance, even with the Corsair 80x card. Another big surprise was the read performance of the cheapest card, the Sandisk 256MB card. It may be that smaller cards are a little faster since there is less memory to access.

We hope to expand on these informal tests with more flash cards and readers in the future. With the increasing number of available options in these products, we hope to be able to give you some guidance beyond marketing hype.