Testing

We tested a 2GB SanDisk Extreme IV compact flash card, both using the Extreme Firewire card reader and a conventional Fujifilm USB 2.0 DCR2-161 USB High-Speed card reader. In this review we also compared the test performance of a 4GB Kingston Ultimate 100x compact flash card and a 133x rated 1GB card from Memory Corp. The MB/sec rates quoted in our tests are for 1024x1024 'mega' bytes, not decimal 'million' bytes, so if you prefer the latter, the numbers will be slightly higher. The tests involved reading and writing a half gigabyte folder of RAW and JPEG image files to and from a 7200RPM SATA hard disk drive in a Windows XP SP2 PC, running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor and 2GB RAM.

We tested the Extreme Firewire card reader using an IEEE1394b 64-bit PCI interface card, but only attached to a 32-bit PCI slot. This means the maximum (theoretical) transfer rate of the interface was limited to 400MB/sec. It's unlikely that 800MB/sec mode would make much difference, but we'll test this later when we get the opportunity.

Read performance
When using the conventional Fujifilm reader, it's clear that there is no performance benefit from Extreme IV when reading data off the card. All three cards operated at about 8MB/sec.



It's a very different story when using the SanDisk Extreme Firewire card reader, especially when connected to the FireWire 800 interface. All three cards received a significant performance boost though, as expected, the SanDisk Extreme IV card's performance was boosted the most, seeing transfer rates rising to nearly three times those achieved via the USB 2.0 reader. The other cards were boosted by between 40 and 80 percent.

When the SanDisk Extreme Firewire card reader was hooked up via a conventional Firewire port, strangely, all three cards measured marginally faster when reading data off them. But as we shall see, write performance was lower.

The fastest read transfer rate we saw from the 2GB SanDisk Extreme IV compact flash card was 23MB/sec, more than double we have seen from any other card. But we also saw the Kingston Ultimate 100x card hit an impressive 16MB/sec thanks to the SanDisk Extreme Firewire card reader.

Write performance
It's when writing to a SanDisk Extreme IV card that its superiority really tells. In all test situations, the 2GB SanDisk Extreme IV compact flash card was at least comfortably faster than the other two cards.



But in the optimal test, with Extreme Firewire card reader hooked up to the Firewire 800 interface, the Extreme IV card operated at 22.1MB/sec, or twice as fast as the fastest other card. The Extreme IV card was also the only one to perform at a comparable rate both in read and write operations.

Camera performance
Clearly, with around 22MB/sec read and write rates at your disposal using the Extreme card reader and Firewire 800 interface, you will be waiting a lot less to copy images to and from your cards. Before, you might be waiting 15-20 minutes to download an entire 8GB card, but now you are talking about 5-6 minutes. But what about benefits in the camera?

Older cameras can benefit from faster cards, of that there is no doubt. A good quality 100x card will reduce the buffer emptying wait in a three year old Olympus E-1 from 2 minutes to just 40 seconds, but the Extreme IV card only reduced that by a further second.

Newer cameras should be able to benefit from Extreme IV more radically, but at the moment we don't have any specific data. As soon we do, we'll let you know.