What a difference a card makes

On Friday, I did a review of the NEW Synchrotech ExpressCard PCIe Card Reader for ExpressCard slots found on MacBook Pros and other various PC laptops. Although the reader performed better than my USB reader in my initial tests, I was disappointed in the apparent lack of speed in the Lexar Professional media. So over the weekend I went out and bought two different CompactFlash cards. I bought the SanDisk (my usual preferred brand) Extreme III 2.0GB card and just for comparison I bought a PNY Optima Pro 2GB Compact Flash. Both cards are rated at 133x.

Using the same exact test folder from Friday of just over 1GB of images I began my tests with the new cards. The results were STUNNING! In my first test with the SanDisk Extreme III card in the Synchrotech reader was almost TWICE AS FAST as my USB reader. However, what was even more shocking was the results I got with the PNY card. I had always seen this brand card, but never tried it before. It seems that most of the pros I know either use SanDisk or Lexar. However, after my tests on Saturday I may be buying a few more PNY cards. Why? Because it was the FASTEST card I’ve tried yet. It copied the same data about 30 seconds faster than the SanDisk card! Now keep in mind that both of these brands come in even faster speeds. SanDisk makes an Extreme IV and PNY makes a UDMA 266x speed card. So the speed increase could even be more dramatic with the ExpressCard reader while over USB there would be no difference because the cards tested are already faster than the USB reader can do. I plan to get the faster versions of each card and do more tests.

In all of my tests the USB 2.0 reader seems to top about at just over 2 minutes to copy over 1.1GB of data from all of the cards I’ve tried. However, the Synchrotech ExpressCard Reader really started to rock with the SanDisk and PNY cards copying the same data in 1:10 and 40.9 seconds respectively.

In this world of Faster, Faster, Faster, the Synchrotech ExpressCard Reader ($65) will become a permanent addition to my camera/computer bag. If you have a notebook with an ExpressCard slot, I highly recommend this reader. It kicks the crap out of USB 2.0 readers. I also recommend that you give the PNY Optioma Pro CompactFlash cards a spin too.