CF cards - which one to buy?

[donkeyontheedge]

I'm looking to upgrade the 128Mb CF card in my 7book to a 256Mb card, or possibly 512Mb. The reason for this is that I would like to be able to store all of the maps from TomTom's CityMaps as well as electronic books etc. I also want to keep copies of all my SIS files so if the 7book ever loses everything I can quickly re-install from wherever I am at the time.

Looking at DABS, they do the following reasonably priced cards
Crucial 256Mb CF is £41.48
PNY 256Mb is £48.01
Crucial 512Mb CF is £88.74
DABSvalue 512Mb CF is £99.00

Now the DABSvalue card is specified as 26x but I cannot find speeds for the other makes of cards. There is one make of CF card on DABS specified at 40x, but it has a price to match.

Is there anywhere I can find the required card speed info?
Is there really that much difference between cards marked at different speeds? The stuff I have dug out from previous posts on this site as well as other sites seem rather contradictory.

Regards
John

[MartinG]

Hi John,

I'm also in the market to upgrade my 256Mb to a 512Mb card so I was interested to read your post. :)

You might also like to look at Crucial's own UK website: http://www.crucial.com/uk/ . They quote their 512Mb card as £90.46 BUT they have free P&P - which on balance will make them marginally cheaper than Dabs (who's site says Crucial's cards are 'special order'). Unfortunately they don't seem to have a spec. for their cards anywhere... :(

There would appear to be some difference in physical speeds on various cards. Usually the newer the faster (for any given size of card) but it's a case of trying to track down the actual manufacturers specifications for cards to do a realistic comparisson of read/write speeds. I'm not sure that I put much store by the various claims of 4x, 8x, 24x, etc.!

Over and above the physical speed of the card, the way it's formatted has a very significant impact on its speed. Actually there's a payoff between the write speed and the usuable capacity of the card. Since you're upgrading from a smaller card, you can probably afford to format for speed. For a fairly (perhaps overly) complete explanation of this, see the compact flash page on my website:- http://www.pscience5.net/Hints_Tips/Compact_Flash.htm (NB: The speeds quoted all apply to 5mx/pro's - they'd be different in a 7/nB).

Personally, I've always bought the cheapest card I can find for the size and then format for speed/usable capacity optimisation...

Cheers,
Martin

[donkeyontheedge]

Originally posted by MartinG
Personally, I've always bought the cheapest card I can find for the size and then format for speed/usable capacity optimisation...


Heh heh, yeah me too... :)
I just thought I'd try a more scientific approach this time.

Interestingly, Expansys do a cheaper 256Mb CF than DABS at only £36.72 inc VAT. Their 512Mb CF is more expensive at £94.00 inc.

I'm going to go for 256Mb at present and then upgrade later if I need to when they are giving away the 512Mb cards in packets of cornflakes :p

I already have Ateliers utils for formatting the cards properly so using one should be no problem.

Regards
John

[Tony Amos]

Be careful with Crucial cards. I have a 32mb card and it occasionally goes corrupt on me. Had to send one back for this reason.

It mainly seems to occur when writing or deleting files. This is on a 5mx so a 7 may be different YMMV.

Having a digital camera, I have been looking at large capacity cards, and one make that seems to get good reviews is Transcend. Have a look here http://www.orcalogic.co.uk/Products/Flash_Com.htm

They are more expensive than Crucial, but probably faster.
You pays your money...

HTH
Tony

[wanman]

I find SimpleTech cards to be some of the best and have never had any problems with the different sizes I have (including a 256mb). The all seem pretty quick. Thing to remember is that the larger the capacity, the slower the response times. This can be gotten around by moving onto one of the newer ultra fast CF cards which I enclose a link. Clove coinfirm that these new faster cards work great with the netBook and are very quick. But I am sure you will have to pay a premium for the speed !!

http://www.simpletech.com/products/consumer/flash/flash_prox.php - Their Pro X High Speed CF Cards

http://www.simpletech.com/products/consumer/flash/compactflash.php - Their normal CF cards for comparison.

Regards

Si

[MartinG]

Originally posted by Tony Amos
Be careful with Crucial cards. I have a 32mb card and it occasionally goes corrupt on me. Had to send one back for this reason.

I'd already placed my order yesterday with them before I saw your post Tony (otherwise I might have thought twice!). In mitigation I'd say that I've twice bought PC DIMMs from them which have proven to be excellent...

I'll report back once it arrives and I've had a chance to test it...

Cheers,
Martin

[markdeppe]

I've been using a crucial 256MB for some time and am very happy with the speed and reliability. they were very quick with dlivery and communications too.

[wanman]

Crucial are excellent for RAM too but not as cheap as www.scan.co.uk although you do have to pay delivery with them so only worth it if you are ordering other stuff too !!

Si

[MartinG]

Well, I'm happy to be able to report that my Crucial 512Mb card arrrived this morning. Fast service considering I ordered online at about 4:30pm the day before yesterday. :)

Tested it using DiskBench and SmartFormat. Had an average read speed of 0.69secs. Didn't bother formatting with FAT12 as I'd have had to have had 256 clusters/sector in order to be able to use all the card. So, results for FAT16 were:-

16 sectors/cluster: 7.54sec
32 sectors/cluster: 4.56sec
64 sectors/cluster: 2.25sec

No point using less than 16s/c (same reason as for FAT12) and more than 64s/c also would've given diminishing returns in terms of speed. Went for 32s/c as a reasonable compromise and in 'real-world'™ usage it seems faster than my unbranded 256Mb card I was using previously (unfortunately I can't remember how I'd formatted that one).

Ah the joys of being able to do a direct copy from e: to d:...

Overall impression - cool! :cool:

Best regards,
Martin