Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Pretty much every single measurement they do is useless for the #1 use of compact flash cards: higher end point&shoot and low-end DSLRs cameras. Why do I care how much CPU my computer takes to read data off a card, or how fast it can read the data? Those are both offline processes that happen while I'm shooting more pictures my the other card. The only statistic that matters to the primary customer use is the sustained write rate, which this page completely ignores.
Rob Galbraith has a long more comprehensive list of CF cards rated by transfer to computer performance here:i d=6007-6133
i d=6007-6111
i d=6007
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?c
The Sandisk Extreme III 1G vs Sandisk Standard 1G on the CF to computer test scores 12.859MB/sec vs 2.377MB/sec
In my Canon 10D
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?c
1.387MB/sec vs 806K/sec (sorry slower older camera that can't reach the speeds of the newer DSLRs)
READ and WRITE speeds may be different. I'm more concerned with how quick the camera writes to the card (Galbraith's numbers) than how quick I can read the data off the card (XYZs numbers)
However...for my money battery life is more important. I'm more concerned with how much battery life the Extreme III vs the Standard card consumes.
I have a 128Mb Sandisk Standard and it drains the battery on my Canon 10D much more quickly than the 512Mb Extreme III that I have. And when the battery gets low on the camera I get an "Error #2" very quickly when using the standard card.
Unfortunately neither Galbraith or XYZ give any numbers on power consumption.
Galbraith goes into more detail on how to compare and review cards here:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?c
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.
That was a great flash-back. A real trip down memory lane.