by Andrey Kuznetcov
07/31/2003 | 01:15 AM
Little by little the top storage capacity of such miniature storage media as CompactFlash cards is growing up. I came across some product announcements on the web, which report the launch of new models featuring 3, 4 or even 5GB storage capacity. However, the developers claim that these solutions will start selling a bit later.
<%BANNER[article]%>In fact 1GB storage space of a CompactFlash card is more than enough for many tasks. Especially in their major application field, namely in digital photography. Using these high-capacity flash media in digital cameras allows storing a lot of pictures in the maximum resolution and saving them in high-quality formats, such as RAW and TIF. Thanks to this opportunity the photographer can go on a trip far away from any civilization and not care at all about moving the pictures from the camera to a notebook or any other device on a daily basis.
The high-capacity flash cards become more and more demanded as there appear more digital cameras with larger light-sensitive matrices. Besides that, you can always use 1GB CompactFlash media in digital audio-players, notebooks and pocket PCs.
Until recently, there were not too many people who could afford to buy CompactFlash cards of large storage capacity, because they cost almost insane money. Even toady we wouldn’t call their price reasonable, however, it still has dropped down quite tangibly lately and you can now buy this device for less than $200.
The table below will show you how much you actually pay per megabyte when buying different CompactFlash cards:
Storage capacity, MB | Total price, USD | Cost per MB, USD |
64 | $20 | $0.313 |
128 | $34 | $0.266 |
256 | $58 | $0.227 |
512 | $110 | $0.215 |
1024 | $233 | $0.228 |
In order to understand how much the user will have to pay for each MB of storage space on the flash-cards of various total storage capacities, we made up a small table having filled it in with the products from Transcend. As you can notice, the most expensive solution per MB is the one with the smallest total storage capacity. Then the price per MB starts dropping and gets a little bit higher as we come to 1GB CompactFlash card. This situation is probably connected with the fact that each mode feature a set sum they need for production expenses (package, mounting, etc.) which is then added to the production cost of the memory itself. In case of a gigabyte card we probably have not very mass production volumes, which results into higher production costs.
Besides CompactFlash cards the users can also get 1GB of storage space on IBM Microdrive (which is now produced by Hitachi Company), which supports the same interface as CompactFlash. Like the CompactFlash cards, IBM Microdrive can also be used in digital cameras, notebooks and other digital devices.
Now let’s take a closer look at a few storage media we have just mentioned and find out which one would be the best choice today. I would like to introduce to you four CompactFlash card models and IBM Microdrive.
Transcend Company will be represented by two flash card models, which look absolutely identically at first glance. You can see the difference only if you take a look at the entire package. As you can notice from the pictures above, the major differences lie in their speeds. One of the packages is marked as 30xc and the other one as 25x, which corresponds to the data transfer rates they support. just like for CD-ROM drives, the 1x speed coefficient is equivalent to 150KB/s.
In fact, I don’t quite understand what exactly the manufacturers imply under this parameter. At least a screenshot from the PQI Company web-site shows that the Transfer Rate value is higher than the write speed, but lower than the read speed.
Nevertheless, the codename of both models will not reveal the differences in their performance. Both cards are marked as TS1GFLASHCP, which can be easily read but doesn’t indicate which flash card of the two is the fastest. If you check the manufacturer’s web-site you will see that all model names with “CP” in the end of the index feature 30x speed. I dare suppose that the card with 25x transfer rate refers to the previous generation of CompactFlash cards, which has been discontinued but is still available in the market.
Inside the packages we found the flash cards packaged into transparent plastic cases, a user’s manual and a warranty card. The model marked as 30x will cost you $233 and the one marked as 25x sells for about $10 less.
The flash-card from Verbatim carries no information about its speeds on the package and on the card sticker. Although you will have no difficulty figuring out how much storage space this medium offers, as there is a bright yellow sticker saying “1GB”. The corporate web-site doesn’t offer any interesting info about this product, and even the 47011 part number didn’t help us to find out anything.
Inside the package we discovered a flash-card in a transparent plastic case only. The cost of this solution is around $220.
Our last testing participant today is IBM Microdrive, which is now manufactured by Hitachi Company. It is a completely different product compared with the CompactFlash cards. From the historical point of view, it was the first one to reach the sacred Gigabyte storage bar and after that the flash-cards caught up with it.
In fact, it only looks similar to a flash-card. Unlike these solid-state memory media, IBM Microdrive is a fully-fledged hard disk drive, but a very tiny one. The spindle rotation speed of IBM Microdrive is 3600rpm. The average seek time equals 12ms. The buffer is 128KB big, but the biggest part of it – 68KB - is used for firmware. The data transfer rate equals 4.2MB/s. this product is compatible with CompactFlash Type II standard. The only thing you should pay special attention to when you use IBM Microdrive in devices supporting this specification, is to make sure that the manuals of these devices do not approve of using IBM Microdrive with them. However, this is not a very frequent case, I should say.
Microdrive device supplied with the IBM Travel Kit costs $200. Of course most of the sum refers to the Microdrive itself and just a little bit to the PC Card adapter.
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:
Manufacturer | Marking | Sandra Professional | Write time, s | Copy time, s | Write speed, MB/s | Read speed, MB/s | Time required to save 8 pictures in a digital cam, s |
PQI | - | 915 | 379.20 | 235.87 | 2.575 | 4.140 | 44 |
Verbatim | - | 870 | 276.93 | 236.33 | 3.526 | 4.132 | 41 |
Transcend | 25x | 936 | 238.83 | 198.34 | 4.088 | 4.924 | 41 |
Transcend | 30x | 982 | 224.35 | 197.91 | 4.355 | 4.934 | 40 |
IBM/Hitachi | Microdrive | 1070 | 530.26 | 271.51 | 1.842 | 3.597 | 53 |
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.
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.
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.
PQI
Verbatim
Transcend 25x
Transcend 30x
IBM/Hitachi Microdrive
The results of Removable Storage/Flash Devices Benchmark can be seen on screenshots above (click to enlarge). All the testing participants are marked in blue. The integral performance parameter of the tested solutions is Combined Device Index, which appeared the highest by IBM Microdrive.
It is probably connected with totally different working algorithms of this solution, which provides a certain advantage over the traditional CompactFlash cards. The cards in their turn got positioned the same way as in the previous tests.
The benchmarks results allow us to draw pretty simple and definite conclusions.
The miniature IBM Microdrive can’t compete in terms of performance with any of the four CompactFlash cards tested. In all practical tests it gets completely ruined by the opponents. Only the Sandra results can be a little consolation, however, we shouldn’t forget that it is mostly a theoretical test.
Taking into account that the price of Microdrive is almost equal to that of CompactFlash cards, it doesn’t make much sense to buy it. Especially since the competing solutions are constantly getting cheaper and any more or less significant price drop in case of IBM Microdrive is hardly possible. Although it could undoubtedly make this product more competitive.
The CompactFlash cards we tested show very big difference in write speed and a somewhat smaller difference in read speed. When we were saving the pictures from the digital camera buffer onto the flash-cards the performance difference got somewhat smaller. Of course, the cards pricing is also different, but you will not be able to feel the real performance advantages with the slow USB 1.1 interface. That is why hunting for more expensive and faster flash-cards is only worth if you have real opportunity to use their potential to the full extent, that is if you have USB 2.0 devices or FireWire. The fastest CompactFlash card appeared the one from transcend marked as 30x. It was the best almost in every test. The slowest of all testing participants turned out the PQI product, as it lost almost everywhere.
This time we took a close look at the storage media compatible with CompactFlash standard and featuring 1GB storage capacity. Many manufacturers have already started to release products like that, however, this is far not the top yet, and bigger flash-cards are already popping up here and there. Later this fall we will be able to forecast the way this market will take in the nearest future. At that time Hitachi should finally start selling the new Microdrive officially launched on January 6, 2003. The new model will boast 4GB storage capacity and will be able to compete with another generation of CompactFlash cards, which is expected to reach 5GB bar by then. I wouldn’t say which side will win, as both device families have very promising growth prospective.
Miniature hard disk drives have very good potential for further data density increase, but are not free from the bottlenecks typical of “large” HDDs, such as high heat dissipation and peak workloads. Among the advantages of CompactFlash cards we should mention the growing number of manufacturers ready to offer their products, which makes the competition more exciting and caused inevitable price reduction. Of course, as the time passes, these devices get more stable and reliable in idle as well as in work mode.
I assume that in case the storage capacities and performance of CompactFlash cards and IBM Microdrive solutions are similar, the better value product will win the market. And in terms of price, CompactFlash has more chances, in my opinion. But time will show...