Test Setup

Previous generation of cards could be tested using traditional card readers. At first USB 2.0 based ones were sufficient, then IDE adapters with DMA managed to deliver the maxium of a card. With the addition of UDMA, such interfaces are no longer fast enough. Most IDE to CF adapters do not offer UDMA at all and even if they do, may not support all different UDMA modes. We will be benchmarking Compact Flash cards with a simple ExpressCard 34 based card reader from now on. Such a card can manage all UDMA modes and thus gives us accurate results.

A "fully loaded" Dell XPS M1330 is used as a host system, which should be capable enough to handle such a card, no matter how you look at it.

Performance

The card performs exceptionally well. With read speeds of over 42 MB/s, it can be considered a a great storage platform for small form factor PCs. The access times of 0.7 ms will also result in great performance.


Taking a look at the performance of various file sizes, the weakness of flash memory devices does become evident once more. Such memory only unfolds its full potential with file sizes larger than 16 KB. ATTO confirms the read scores of HDD Tach, while revealing a write performance of around 30 MB/s. This is certainly impressive as well. A-DATA does mention over 50 MB/s read and over 40 MB/s write, but no matter with what interface the card was tested (USB 2.0, IDE, Firewire 800 and the illustrated ExpressCard34), it did not manage the advertised performance. Nevertheless, the A-DATA 350x Turbo card is the fastest CF card out there when it comes to read speeds, that's for sure.

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.

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 (results above), Vista was used to attain the results below, as it is the newest operating system from Microsoft out there.


It 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.