Testing CF cards transfer speed with Transcend and Hama card readers

A few days ago I became a happy owner of new Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. Thus I decided to buy a larger compact flash card. I wanted 32GB with a good speed. However the price of top-range brand name cards seemed a bit too high so I decided to make a compromise - i.e. to get large capacity and reasonable speed, but not the fastest possible.

I bought Silicon Power 200x card and I got interesting results testing data transfer speed.


I did a basic test on my PC, using USB card reader. My older cards shown on the picture are rated 100x (PQI) and 133x (Transcend). They both demonstrate read speed of about 40 MB/s (reading large file from card to hard drive of my PC). However the card from Silicon Power has only shown 16 MB/s in my initial test with Transcend M5 card reader. I repeated the test few times with the same result. At first I was very disappointed, but when I repeated my tests with Hama card reader I've got the speed of ~44 MB/s from the same card!

The writing speed is approximately the same for Silicon Power and for 133x Transcend and is about 9 MB/s (100x PQI is notably slower).

I paid about 70 Eur for the Silicon Power card while the brand name 266x-300x cards are priced above 150 Eur, so I am very happy now with the saving I got :)

My main surprise is that cheap Hama reader overperformed the Transcend by so much - but only on 32GB card. The tests with 8GB and 2 GB cards didn't show a difference between 2 card readers. FYI Hama reader is a box from blue transparent plastic and called 'Cardreader 19 in 1'. It has partnumber 00055114. I've got one in Germany for 9 or 10 Euro. (The one from Transcend looks nicer - it's a square white glossy box in "Mac-style" but it failed miserably with large card.)


Click here to see the full post and comments

About my posts

While I am blog reader for several years, I started blogging just a few months ago. One thing I noticed about myself is that most of my blogs require some preparation - process/post some photos, find some links to other sites or forums, etc. As I am constantly running short of time I tend to postpone writing in my blog, even when I know what I want to say.

Another thing is that sometimes I don't have anything worth sharing for several days; but sometimes I am getting to more than one post a day.

So taking that all into account I will start using the technique widely used by more experienced bloggers - I will start a draft post when I just get something in my mind that is worth sharing, and I will complete my drafts as time allows. This should help to spread my posts in time more evenly.

P.S. The readers of this blog will not see any incomplete drafts until I finalize them and "publish".
Click here to see the full post and comments