Flash Memory, a Look Back

An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has an interesting roundup of CompactFlash cards manufactured between 1998 and 2005. The cards go through a number of tests to see how the many changes which CF cards have undergone have affected their performance. One of the most interesting aspects of the article is a head-to-head comparison of "extreme" speed flash memory and that same company's less expensive standard model."

Comments

Interesting

[MBCook]

This is an interesting little article. The most interesting this is that in all this time the flash format is the same. Lucky. I'm not sure that will hold for the next 6 years. CF is popular, but it is wider than ExpressCard 34 (which could be a problem) and it has SD/MiniSD/MicroSD/MS/MS-Duo/Micro-MS/MMC/12 other things biting at it's heals (SD is getting very popular).

I find the difference between the two top Sandisk cards (the normal and the Ultra III) very interesting. I've been meaning to buy a new memory card for my camera (I'd like a bigger one) and knowing that the difference is that little could save me some money.

But that one card's access time is just HORRIDNESS. As the author said, that was bundled for free with a camera, and you do get what you pay for. Wow.

Can't Live without Flash Memory

[denverradiosucks]

I got my first flash memory drive about two years ago. For me, its the best thing to happen to storage in years.

With that said, I am still surprised by the large number of floppies used by students and teachers in our education system (K-12). I did IT consulting work at a charter school for two years (just left for a higher paying job), and I had numerous cases where students (and even teachers) were saving documents directly to floppy disks! They would be distraught beyond description when they found out the disk went bad as it was crushed and pounded inside of a backpack, and the data was destroyed. I told everyone that had this happen to them to switch to usb flash drives and it has made the biggest difference.

My usb drive has been through the washing machine, dropped, stepped on, and plugged into hundreds of machines over the last two years with no data integrity loss. It holds all my software utilities for my job, and two years worth of school work. I've had hard drives fail, CD that stopped reading, and the aforementioned floppy disks. I would say that flash memory has been the most reliable form of data storage I have used in my 20 years of using computers.

SD cards are still faster

[jonr]

The CF standard is beginning to show its age. SD cards are close in capacity, and definitly faster. You also don't have any pins to bend in your camera.