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Menu Introduction Akasa Combo CnMemory 2in1 Hama 19in1 MSI StarReader Transcend 13in1 TwinMOS 8in1 Verbatim 11in1 Conclusion |
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Introduction Card readers are getting very popular now. They are cheap and allow you to transfer data to the computer much faster than PDAs and digital cameras. But how much faster are card readers? Unfortunately there is no straight answer. It depends on the speed of both the card reader and the memory card. If speed is important you need a fast memory card and a fast card reader. Finding a fast memory card is not that difficult. Just check the speed rating on the card and multiply it by 150 to get the transfer speed in KB/s. For example, a 120X card can reach speeds of 18000 KB/s (17.5 MB/s). If there's no speed rating on the memory card, you can assume it's a slow card. Things are more complicated when choosing a fast card reader. All but few manufacturers simply show the maximum transfer speed of the PC interface. This is 480 mbps (60 MB/s) for USB 2.0 devices, which is the most common interface for card readers. But at the moment there's not a single USB card reader who comes even close to this speed. The slowest card reader from our test could only reach 3.5 MB/s which is more than five times slower than the fastest card reader. How we testWe measured the read and write speed of three memory cards: TwinMOS CF 140X, TwinMOS SD 150X and PQI SD 150X. For this we used Flash Memory Toolkit from EFD Software which is a handy utility for testing memory cards.Fifty percent of the final score is given according to the performance. The other fifty percent is given for the build quality of the card reader. There is a seperate score for CF and SD cards. |
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