Testbed and Methods

The CompactFlash cards and IBM Microdrive have very specific application field, which actually determined the applied testing methodology.

Most of the tests were carried out with the help of a card reader with IEEE1394 interface.

Of course, the major parameters for these devices are data read and write speeds. In order to measure them, we used FC-Test benchmark (see our article called: X-bit labs Presents: FC-Test for Hard Disk Drives for more details and free download of this test set). With the help of this benchmark set we created a 976MB file on the system HDD, which was then copied to the storage media plugged into the external card reader with IEEE1394 (FireWire) interface. After that the file was copied back to the system hard disk drive. The time spent on these operations and the performance throughout the test were all taken by FC-Test program.

Besides, we also took into account that these CompactFlash cards are mostly used for storing digital images in cameras, and tried to emulate this situation. With the help of Canon EOS D60 we took 8 pictures in a row at the maximum resolution. After that we measured how long it took the flash-card to save all the pictures with the total size of 56.8MB in RAW format.

The recently released new version of the well-known SiSoft Sandra Professional 2003.7.9.73 allows testing removable media with the help of Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark. We couldn’t miss this opportunity and tested all our five devices with the benchmark.

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Elitegroup K7S5A;
• AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU;
• 512MB PC3200DDR SDRAM;
• ATI RADEON 8500 64 MB graphics card;
• IBM DTLA 307015 15GB UDMA/5 HDD;
• IEEE 1394 PCI-controller: Agere FW323-05 chip;
• Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0 installed.

Performance

FC-Test

The results of this test show very clearly that IBM Microdrive falls noticeably behind the others. The lag is especially evident when we measure the write speed. The CompactFlash cards from Transcend and Verbatim appeared almost twice as fast as IBM Microdrive. The PQI card is a little slower here, but is anyway defeats IBM Microdrive. Among the two Transcend cards the winner in this test appeared the model marked as 30x. Although its advantage over the 25x rival appeared not as significant as we had expected judging by the speed marking.

When we turned to read speeds, the situation leveled out somehow. The flash-memory cards came to the finish line in pairs having shown very similar results. The PQI CompactFlash performed almost as fast as the solution from Verbatim, and the victory was shared between a pair from Transcend. The Miniature Microdrive again finished the very last, though this time it didn’t fall so far behind.

Pictures Saving on a Digital Cam

This is the most practical benchmark we carried out. Each time after we took a series of 8 pictures we measured the time it took to save all of them from the digital camera buffer onto the storage devices we consider. The results obtained indicate that the whole thing went on really slowly in case of IBM Microdrive. it takes this device about 20-25% more time to complete the task than it takes CompactFlash cards. And the performance difference between the tested flash-memory cards was not so significant as in the previous test. The explanation is very simple. The time required to complete the writing depends a lot on the camera processor power and the bandwidth of the internal interface, which is used to transfer the data from the buffer to the storage medium. I assume that these factors lead to a certain leveling of the final results. Nevertheless, the least time of all required Transcend 30x CompactFlash card. The next fastest was the PQI card, while Transcend 25x and Verbatim solutions performed almost equally.

SiSoft Sandra Professional

The Removable Storage/Flash Devices Benchmark from the Sandra package carries out a set of file operations. Some files are written onto the tested devices, then they are read from them and after that deleted. The test files sizes are: 512Bytes, 32KB, 256KB and 2MB. The performance is represented in number of operations per minute and the corresponding speed in KB/s. Delete Performance is measured according to the number of “killed” file per minute.