Digital Photography Now Peripheral Reviews

Crucial 256MB CF card

14th July - 2002
By Ian Burley

See our CF mini group test - click here. Buy this card - click here.

UPDATE - click here

Crucial Technology is part of the Micron Technology group. Micron is a memory IC and controller chip specialist, best known for making PC memory and support chips and modules.

Serving as the retail arm of Micron Technology, Crucial is its key brand. The company sells online via its own Web site and affiliates, like DP-Now.

While we at DP-Now can gain valuable income from sales of Crucial cards via affiliate banners and links on our pages, we don’t let this affect our product testing. Indeed, we didn’t request a review card from Crucial - they offered one to us!

We received a 256MB Type I Compact Flash card from Crucial. It’s priced very competitively at £69.29 (excl.VAT, but including shipping) via the Crucial Web site and this price, at the time of writing could be reduced by a further £8 via a one-off online voucher scheme.

We applied our usual tests to the card and the results are graphed below and compared with some other cards we have tested recently.

Our large file test shows that on the test bench the Crucial card is not a flyer, though it does still manage to pip the SanDisk Ultra by a second.

Again, the write performance of the Crucial 256 is nothing to write home about, being pretty average for a standard specification card.

This was the worst benchmark result for the Crucial 256, though this test is less relevant to digital camera use as it deals with files a lot smaller than typical digital camera image file.

The Crucial card may be quite leisurely at giving up its data in small file form, it performs a lot more convincingly when receiving multiple small files.

File delete performance saw the Crucial 256 nearly twice as fast as its nearest rival and six times faster than the SanDisk Ultra 128 card.

*Includes all Crucial discounts as of 7th July, 2002

If you include all the promotional offers currently available from Crucial, their 256MB card is remarkably affordable at only 24 pence per megabyte of storage space.

Real world performance

We bench test cards using a Firewire card reader. This makes the card reader much faster than any current CF cards on the market. Some cameras can run cards to the limit of their performance, but most cannot. We tested the Crucial 256 with two digital cameras and compared ‘recovery’ times with the very fast  Toshiba XtraSpeed card we recently reviewed. Indeed, the XtraSpeed is the fastest card we have yet tested.

Using an Olympus E-20 digital SLR, there was no discernible difference in post-shot recovery times between the Crucial card and the Toshiba one. It was the same story with a Kodak DX4900 compact digicam, which takes over 15 seconds to save its 4 megapixel images.

Compatibility

Finally, our simple compatibility test, using the Crucial 256MB CF card with a Microsoft Windows Pocket PC 2001 device, was passed with no need to find specific device drivers.

UPDATE: We have had confirmed reports that the Minolta Dimage 7i is not compatible with the Crucial 256MB card. Crucial says the Dimage 7 and 7i need cards rated at least ‘12x’ for sizes above 128MB and we understand the Crucial cards are 10x rated. What’s more confusing is that we have reports from users who have successfully used 256MB Crucial cards in their Dimage 7 and 5 cameras. Further investigation does reveal that the Dimage 7-series is more fussy than most when it comes to card compatibility. No other cameras in the Minolta range seem to be affected. Minolta is hinting that there will be a fix in the future and we will be keeping an eye on this. If you find your Crucial card does not work, there is a 30-day return policy - for further details, check the Crucial site.

Conclusion

The Crucial 256 does not impress on the test bench, but its overall performance is not really any worse than average and unless your camera has an unusually fast CF interface, the Crucial 256 will be more than adequate.

What’s really impressive is its price, which is undeniably attractive. We’ve scanned most of the UK CF card vendors and we haven’t found a cheaper 256MB card so far.

You can buy this card and others in Crucial range by clicking on the banner below. All sales via these links will generate valuable funds for the continued development and upkeep of this site.

See our CF mini group test - click here.
 

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