1GB CompactFlash Roundup @ Anandtech

[Steve]

We use the little critters all over the place. Good ol' compact flash cards have wangled their way into cameras, PDAs and just about every other portable device you can list. Anandtech take no less than eight 1GB CF cards for a spin to see if there's a difference between them.

Lexar's "Write Acceleration Technology" seems to have extended its performance past the supported digital cameras to our desktop flash memory card reader, while the Professional series card has performed the quickest out of 10 cards in the Real World test. However, SanDisk has also proven itself a worthy product by topping the HDTach charts in sequential read and write performance.

We, of course, knew that we'd be comparing apples to oranges by throwing 1x cards together with the higher performance 80x cards, so let's break them down by their manufacturer's specifications, real measured performance, and price.

[Anandtech]

[TheAnimus]

Interesting, i would of thought that the endurance factor reading was at best erronous thou, as it sounds a bit simplistic compared to what actually happens (they might of taken this into account thou).

Under NT, windows automatically uses its flash driver, this is ment to prevent eccessive ware to anypart of the card. It does this by not writing to say the first 100clusters again and again. More modern cards have this built in themselfs. They dynamically re-map which clusters are which. Quite nifty. They also have intresting pipelining and buffers for the data. All of which would make benching wear quite difficult. As they seamed to draw conclusions from that, it dosen't seam fair in my mind. Enless however sandra took all this into account in the calculation of the wear factor.