Performance

A-DATA mentions up to 40 MB/s in IDE mode. A generic CF to IDE adapter is used to treat the unit like any other hard drive within the operating system. While we could give you USB 2.0 benchmarks as well, most card readers become the bottleneck for such fast cards. A quick run of the A-DATA Turbo CF card in a standard card reader yielded ~7MB/s write and ~11 MB/s read speed. This is much lower than the attained results below.


The card manages just under 30 MB/s read speed. This is quite a bit off from the advertised 40 MB/s maximum. On the other hand it performs almost exactly twice as good as the 32GB Turbo version of the card, which is classified as 120 or 133x.


ATTO reveals a very pleasant surprise. The greatest downside of the Speedy version is its low write speed. The 16GB Turbo Compact Flash card manages a very impressive 20 MB/s write speed.

PCMark 05

Due to the sheer size of the Compact Flash, the use as a boot volume comes to mind. To give you some numbers on the general performance as a hard drive in every day use, PCMark05 was used. The results are pitted against the same system running on a traditional hard drive.

These numbers are more than twice as fast as the results of the A-DATA 32GB Turbo Compact Flash card. While these numbers pale in comparison to a normal hard drive, it should still be fine as a boot drive for an operating system.