Digital Photography Now Peripheral Reviews

Toshiba XtraSpeed 128MB CF card

16th May - 2002
By Ian Burley

See our CF mini group test - click here.

As its name suggests, XtraSpeed is a compact flash card aimed at users looking for more performance than average.

Toshiba is one of the major manufacturers of flash memory chips and is also a strategic partner with SanDisk, the company that invented the Compact Flash memory card that is so popular in the digital camera world. Both companies share a massive flash memory manufacturing plant Japan.

We recently tested SanDisk’s Ultra 128MB CF card and found that while its ability to record large files, like camera image files, was impressive, it was surprisingly poor at dealing with read operations and small files .

As Toshiba and SanDisk have such close ties it was tempting to assume that the Toshiba XtraSpeed card was juts a re-branded SanDisk Ultra. However, our tests tell a different story.

In fact, the Toshiba XtraSpeed is easily the best all-round CF card performer we have tested to date. Large file read rates are comparable to SanDisk’s Ultra card, but without any of the Ultra’s problems keeping when the card is read or when dealing with small files.

Test results

Here are the graphed results of our timings of the Toshiba XtraSpeed card, including comparisons with other cards we have tested recently:

The Toshiba card is slighthly faster than the already speedy SanDisk Ultra when receiving large files, like digital camera image files.

Unlike the SanDisk Ultra, the Toshiba XtraSpeed’s excellent large file write speed did not coma at the expense of its read rate, which is the fastest we have come across.

The Toshiba XtraSpeed faired a lot better than the SanDisk Ultra when receiving large numbers of small files, only being beaten by the Dane-Elec card.

Read performance when dealing with small files continued the Toshiab XtraSpeed’s consistently fast results.

Small file delete performance is very good too.

Compatibility

Finally, our simple compatibility test, using the Toshiba XtraSpeed card with a Microsoft Windows Pocket PC device, was passed with no need to find specific device drivers.

Conclusion

The Toshiba XtraSpeed 128MB compact flash card can be obtained for £53.80 inc.VAT from Card Media (click here). 64MB and 256MB versions are also available.

Our tests show the Toshiba XtraSpeed is among the fastest compact flash cards currently available and its performance is consistent throughout all our tests.

A card like this will not benefit all digital camera card users; cheaper models tend to have slow memory card sub-sytems that faster cards can’t improve on. But higher end camera users have a good chance of noticing faster image caching times. And the card is available for only a modest premium over a non-branded budget-priced card.

If you use a camera that has a CF sub-system that can use the extra performance that the Toshiba XtraSpeed offers, we have no hesitation in recommending this fine performing and good value card.

See our CF mini group test - click here.
 

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