Performance

PCMark Vantage

The downside of testing with the ExpressCard34 adapter is the fact, that the card shows up as a removable flash device in Windows. This means that we cannot use the adapter to benchmark the overall performance of the card as a hard drive.


HDTach shows us that the Lexar 300x Compact Flash card is slightly slower than the 350x A-DATA version. Even though there is a notable difference on paper (50x), it translates to just a few small MB/s in real life.


ATTO also shows the write performance of the card. The card was tested three times, just because I was so surprised to see write performance equal the read speed. The Lexar Professional UDMA card is by far the fastest Compact Flash card when write speed is concerned.

The next best interface is the use of a Lexar FireWire 800 card reader. This type of unit shows up as a normal removable device, which we can use in combination with PC Mark Vantage to get an idea as to how the card performs in various operations usually done by the operating system. While we used Windows XP to attain the fastest possible speed of the card, Vista was used to attain the results below, as it is the newest operating system from Microsoft out there.


t is obvious, that the memory card cannot manage to deliver the speeds of a 7200 RPM or 10000 RPM desktop drive, but should do well against notebook 2.5 inch 5400 RPM or 1.8 inch 4200 RPM parts. It does even manage to best both traditional drives tested when it comes to the gaming benchmark and the 7200 RPM during the Windows Defender portion of PCMark Vantage. Remember, the card is about 10% slower when used in combination with the FireWire 800 card reader, so these scores should be even better when used natively on a motherboard, that comes equipped with a CF card slot. The average of the Lexar Professional card is faster than the A-DATA version. The excellent write speed gives the Lexar card an edge in PC Mark Vantage.