Flash Media: 1GB CompactFlash Roundup
by Purav Sanghani on December 23, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
SiSoft Sandra File System Benchmark
SiSoft Sandra does things a little different than HDTach 3 RW. The results reported here refer to the number of operations per minute while working with the various sizes of chunks of data. The final "Combined Index" value refers to the "combined performance in terms of Combined Operations Per Second, with respect to a mix of write, read and delete operations" across all of the tested file sizes.
The number we see for the "Endurance Factor" represents the overall "Wear and Life Expectancy" of the flash media. The fact of the matter is that flash media can be written to only so many times. Upon each write, some amount of wear occurs which cause performance degradation and eventually, though not so quickly, failure of the media. SiSoft Sandra calculates the "Endurance Factor" by dividing the average performance, for example a sequential write, by the lowest performance, a rewrite of the same block of data initially written to. For all of the values, high is always better.
As far as performance goes, Lexar's Professional series CompactFlash media takes the gold with its combined index of 3543 operations per minute but its overall life expectancy is not much to drool about. The values should be compared not to any outside standard but only to the other media on this list and it looks like Viking's standard CompactFlash model is going to outlive the rest of these devices. In fact, none of the top performers look like they will live as long as the lower performing cards. We assume this is because the high performance products perform a lot more read, write, and erase operations on average compared to the lower end cards. It is a simple trade-off between performance and life expectancy.
SiSoft Sandra does things a little different than HDTach 3 RW. The results reported here refer to the number of operations per minute while working with the various sizes of chunks of data. The final "Combined Index" value refers to the "combined performance in terms of Combined Operations Per Second, with respect to a mix of write, read and delete operations" across all of the tested file sizes.
The number we see for the "Endurance Factor" represents the overall "Wear and Life Expectancy" of the flash media. The fact of the matter is that flash media can be written to only so many times. Upon each write, some amount of wear occurs which cause performance degradation and eventually, though not so quickly, failure of the media. SiSoft Sandra calculates the "Endurance Factor" by dividing the average performance, for example a sequential write, by the lowest performance, a rewrite of the same block of data initially written to. For all of the values, high is always better.
| SiSoft Sandra Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark Operations per second |
|||||||
| 512B | 32KB | 256KB | 2MB | 64MB | Combined Index | Endurance Factor | |
| EDGE | 1885 | 1659 | 866 | 161 | 6 | 1509 | 14.0 |
| Kingston | 351 | 331 | 242 | 33 | 2 | 299 | 38.2 |
| Lexar | 4699 | 3853 | 1355 | 194 | 7 | 3543 | 7.6 |
| PNY | 650 | 613 | 464 | 71 | 5 | 556 | 19.3 |
| PQI | 240 | 230 | 197 | 78 | 3 | 215 | 42.7 |
| RiData | 1080 | 1000 | 676 | 87 | 6 | 903 | 32.4 |
| Rosewill | 240 | 231 | 200 | 79 | 3 | 216 | 43.3 |
| SanDisk | 470 | 439 | 349 | 94 | 7 | 407 | 43.5 |
| Transcend | 1588 | 1428 | 849 | 127 | 7 | 1296 | 8.9 |
| Viking | 245 | 236 | 206 | 81 | 3 | 221 | 45.0 |
As far as performance goes, Lexar's Professional series CompactFlash media takes the gold with its combined index of 3543 operations per minute but its overall life expectancy is not much to drool about. The values should be compared not to any outside standard but only to the other media on this list and it looks like Viking's standard CompactFlash model is going to outlive the rest of these devices. In fact, none of the top performers look like they will live as long as the lower performing cards. We assume this is because the high performance products perform a lot more read, write, and erase operations on average compared to the lower end cards. It is a simple trade-off between performance and life expectancy.
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macraig - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
Your research for the CF Roundup was incomplete: Pretec, a manufacturer with a history of producing higher-capacity CF media before anyone else, has been producing a 12GB CompactFlash card for some time now; it's also 80X media to boot. It will set you back as much as a complete gaming desktop system, of course; right now the MSRP is still $5000, but I think I saw it for $1700 somewhere. Pretec's two or three press releases about it were widely reported. A search in Google for "12gb cf" will educate you. Pretec also produces a 4GB SD card, greater capacity than anyone else AFAIK. I was surprised Pretec wasn't even included in the review.Mark Craig
mindless1 - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
The price-point for 12GB CF seems a bit unrealistic still for most uses.4GB SD are available from other brands now and at more normal price levels, between $250-300 to start. Key with these is the ability of the device using them to support the capacity and filesystem.
tygrus - Saturday, December 24, 2005 - link
Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year.artifex - Saturday, December 24, 2005 - link
Also, why not use an IDE to CF straight adapter?You don't know for sure that that device you're connecting in the middle can actually write at the max speed the card is capable of. A few years ago, Lexar was packing their own adapters in with their cards, saying people had to use them to get top speed. And that was back when top speed was 4, 8, 16x.
Glitchny - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
i know they cost like 2x as much as the ultra 2s however i ould have liked to see them included in the tests to see just how fast they arePauli - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this "Endurance Factor" pretty useless. It sounds to me like they're saying that, because a card is faster it will be written to more often and thus, not last as long. For digicam users this is not relevant; we will be writing to it the same number of times regardless of its speed -- I don't take more photos just because the CF speed is faster!AtaStrumf - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
I agree! Sure looks a bit too simple of a test to have any real value.If you're thinking of branching out, may I suggest Flash MP3 (+FM Tuner) Players, the cheap kind, not iPod Shuffle kind. I spent the entire last night going through tens of cheap ass "reviews", just to find out ... not much. Maybe I was just looking in all the wrong places, but not being a big portable music fan (buying a xmas gift), I just didn't know where to look and google wasn't terribly useful either and neither were forums.
I ended up buying a derivative of this here thingy:
http://www.s1mp3.org/en/index.php">http://www.s1mp3.org/en/index.php
I posted my review of it here:
http://users.volja.net/lukaakul/cny512-usb20.htm">http://users.volja.net/lukaakul/cny512-usb20.htm
[in slovene, but there are some nice pictures to look at, really]
In short, it's fine at playing MP3s (though to be honest, I didn't have anything to compare it to), but sloooooooooooooowwwwww at transferring files. That same old Full Vs. High speed USB 2.0 trick.
Ecmaster76 - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
I know typically most people with use USB card readers, but perhaps it might be worth testing with a IDE<->CF adapter to see if anything comes out differently.BTW Said adapters + 8GB CF rock if you want to make a truly silent, no moving parts computer...
highlandsun - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link
Agreed. Actually I'd like to see a test using a notebook and a CF to PCMCIA adapter, since that was my primary interface. I hate USB adapters...BikeDude - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link
Delkin has a CF to CardBus adapter that on my laptop delivers 10MB/s (reading Sandisk Extreme III cards). A PCMCIA adapter would only deliver a tenth of that speed... (granted, it costs significantly less, but its usefulness is limited on 1GB+ cards)--
Rune