Performance

Test System

IDE Performance

While we will usually give you general performance numbers when used through a USB 2.0 interface, this is not what we will focus on this time around. As mentioned before, the size and intended purpose of this card is as a hard drive. The card will be benchmarked through the IDE interface and compared to a normal drive 7200 rpm SATA drive. We want to find out if the A-DATA 32 GB Speedy CF Card is a viable alternative to a normal hard drive. Such a use is especially interesting for small form factor PCs or media center units.


As you can see the 32G Speedy CF Card manages a constant 15 MB/s. This is certainly not faster than hard drives. The only hard drives which may be comparable to such a performance are 1.8" drives found in some ultra portables. The average read speed is not the interesting factor. Taking a closer look at the access time and CPU utilization, this is where the card shines. An incredible 0.8 ms access time and 0% CPU utilization are excellent results.


Another shortcoming of flash memory is the inability to read and write small files at the maximum speed. The 32 GB card from A-DATA is no different here. The maximum read and write performance is reached with file sizes larger than 64 kb. At this point it manages to write data at just around 4 MB/s which is certainly a fraction compared to any other hard drive out there.

Boot Volume Performance

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.


As you can see, the Compact Flash drive as a boot medium is much slower than any traditional drive. PCMark05 was not able to return a result on "General Usage" for the Compact Flash drive. Flash memory is generally very bad at reading and writing small files at an acceptable speed, which is reflected in this result. On top of these results, Windows XP Service Pack 2 was installed on the A-DATA 32 GB Compact Flash card to acertain the amount of time it takes to complete the installation. The time frame mentioned during the setup process is usually fairly accurate, giving you a ball park figure. This was clearly not the case in this scenario. The installer reported 34 minutes at the beginning of the GUI based setup, but finished roughly two and a half hours later. Windows itself works perfectly fine with the card, even though there is a noticable and considerable amount of lag when opening specific windows within the operating system. Nonetheless the card as a boot volume works and should make such a use very interesting for extremly compact computers like nano-ITX or Atom based PCs. For those who do not need the space, going for a smaller, faster card like one from A-DATAs Turbo series may be more appropriate.

Every day use

I also used the A-DATA 32 GB Compact Flash card for all the pictures I have taken during my trip to Computex 2008. One may wonder, why you would need such a large card. It does come in handy, as you never need to worry about running out of space. Even at full resolution and highest detail, the card can hold around 5000 ten megapixel images in JPG format. That should suffice for a seven day trip.