AnandTech: Flash Media: 1GB CompactFlash Roundup

Introduction

The demand for flash media has grown astronomically over the last few years as more digital devices such as personal digital music players, personal digital assistants, and digital cameras have gone main stream, and we're only going to see the demand for higher capacities and speeds to complement the quickly advancing technologies such as professional digital cameras and personal entertainment devices.

One of the most common types of flash media is the CompactFlash digital media, which is based on the same ATA standard as on hard disk drives. CompactFlash media was the first to provide high capacities and keeps its track record by providing up to 8GB of solid state memory (by the time that this article will be published). The transfer rates of CompactFlash media have also increased over the years from the 1x, 150KB/sec standard cards to the current maximum of 16MB/sec rates. Also, the CFA ( CompactFlash Association) released (just under a year ago) revision 3.0 of the CompactFlash Specification Revision to increase the interface transfer rates to 66MB/sec.

There is an abundance of brands, capacities, and speeds of CompactFlash media in the market today, which range in price between $15-$800 (256MB-8GB), but our focus for this roundup will be currently the most widely used capacity of 1GB. We have put together a list of brands both well known in the memory and flash media industry as well as some that many of us are seeing for the first time. Take a look at our competitors below.

Click to enlarge.

	Model	Part No.	Price
EDGE	Standard	PE188993	$59.77
Kingston	Standard	CF/1024	$49.99
Lexar	Professional (80x)	-	$87.59
PNY	Optima (80x)	-	$85.72
PQI	Standard	AC16-1030	$60.81
RiData	Pro 52x	-	~$56
Rosewill	-	RCF1024	$51.99
SanDisk	Ultra II	SDCFH-1024	$73.95
Transcend	80x	TS1GCF80	$65.95
Viking	Standard	CF1GB	$53.99

All of these cards are standard CompactFlash Type I media cards with varying speeds with exception of the Lexar Professional series media, which features its "Write Acceleration Technology", said to improve image write speeds by up to 23% with compatible cameras. This is done with the aid of special firmware on the media as well as the cameras themselves, which allow them to work together to improve the write algorithms. However, we have also seen an improvement in write speeds in our benchmarks as well, but we'll let you see for yourself.

Special thanks to NewEgg for providing us with the CompactFlash cards for this review.

	$12.99
	$15.98