are certain compact flash cards "faster" than others?

[bubbasmith99]

i'm currently using a 128 mb PNY compact flash card with my canon s230. it's pretty good but i was wondering if maybe another card would be faster? do certain manufacturers design faster compact flash cards than others? or are they all basically the same except for capacity?

 

[corkyg]

Yes - there are regulars, 12X, 24X and I've seen 32X as well. I use a 256 MB 12X in mi digicam.

 

[bubbasmith99]

how do you find out the speed fo your cf card?

it says MC12C1281MYO on the back of mine...

perhaps that's 12x at 128 MB?

waaah i want a 32x

 

[jvang125]

there's no standard on speed for CF cards so one company can claim their's is running at 32x but is only as fast as another company's 24x. check www.dpreview.com. i think they had an article rating the speeds of various CF manufacturers.

 

[Peter]

Yes, an "x" rating on CF cards is definitely marketing bull.

Read throughput ranges from 1 to about 5 MB/s currently. Writes are slower, from hardly to a lot slower that is.

 

[LED]

Read and Write would be mostly depended on the Source/Device doing it , not the Media.

 

[Pauli]

I have a Canon S100 camera (similar to the S230) and several different CF cards. The SimpleTech 256MB card that I have is significantly faster than the others.

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: LED
Read and Write would be mostly depended on the Source/Device doing it , not the Media.

LED, oh yes they are. As I said above already, CF drives are in the 1 to 5 MB/s range on reads, and even slower on writes. With CF interface basically being IDE, it is indeed the media that bottlenecks the data transfers.

 

[bluntman]

When I first bought my Minolta 7i camera I picked up a Sandisk 96MB CF card, the regular red and blue ones. After some experiementing with the camera's many settings I found that after shooting in burst mode (10 frames shot in fast sequence) the camera would take almost a minute to write the sequence of photos to the CF card. During which time I couldn't do anything with the camera. To me this was unacceptable, so I picked up a Transcend 256MB 25x CF card from My Digital Discount and found the burst mode write times were cut down by more than half!

To answer your question, yes, certain flash cards are in fact faster than others.

 

[LED]

Peter...Thanks. I stand correct as I see the CF Media Card is bottled but I put the Same CF Card Test in a USB2.0 device the Read/Write is faster then the USB 1.0 Direct/Hub or Camera Device (won't test)...so the device would have something to do with it as well and if the CF cards are IDE interfaced then why are most readers via USB?

 

[JonTom]

Yes, different cards perform differently. See here for more info: DPreview

 

[JohnPaul]

Actually, the PNY cards are supposed to be pretty fast, at least from some reviews I have read. I have a 64mb cf card, and it seems pretty fast, but then all I am comparing it to is the 16mb Lexar 4x and 16mb Canon cards that came with my last two cameras.

 

[Peter]

LED, those USB card readers have tiny little USB-IDE controllers inside - just like USB CDRW drives and those tiny USB HDDs do.Another reason for making card readers USB attached is USB's hot plug capability, something that just isn't there when you run a CF drive directly on an IDE port.


Of course USB 1.x with its real life maximum throughput of about 800 KB/s bottlenecks even the slowest CF drives. Your test neatly shows this - your USB 1.x test run (center window) hit the ceiling at 650 KB/s, although your CF drive is capable or about 5 MB/s read, 2 MB/s write (left window) - which makes it a pretty fast one btw. The data shown in the right window there cannot possibly have come from an USB 1.x device, since USB 1.x has a maximum _raw_ bandwidth of 12 Mbit/s or 1.5 MByte/s. No way to get 2 MByte/s actual data transfer across it.

CF-on-IDE is something very frequently done in embedded computing btw.

 

[LED]

Thanks for the bytes Peter...between your explaination and the DP Review that JonTom posted I believe I have my mind right

I did some research on the external reader that I benched on the right and found out that it is USB2.0 compatible. I believe the reason why it is slower then my internal one is because it is going through a Hub.

BTW the CF that I tested was a Kingston 128MB Standard CompactFlash...Think I'll stick with them or the Vikings that my Supplier offers.