How is your hard disk drive performance? Is its reading and writing speed fast enough for your video editing applications or fast pace gaming? CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmark software. It can benchmark reading and writing speed of hard disk drive (HDD), solid-state drive (SSD), and flash memory like Secure Digital (SD, SDHC, SDXC) and Compact Flash (CF) cards.
Compact Flash (CF) Card X-Speed Rating is not exact same as SD, SDHC and SDXC Card Speed Class Rating which use minimum writing speed as guideline. CF card is based on value of X which translate into 1X = 150 KiloBytes per second. The X-Speed rating is up to writing speed (no minimum writing speed defined which mean it might be lower writing speed). Example, 10X is equivalent up to 1.5 MB/s writing speed.
8GB Kingston 133X Elite Pro Compact Flash Card is another that I bought for my Canon EOS 400D SLR camera. I felt its writing speed was slower than 2GB Transcend 120X Compact Flash Card when started to use it. But it should not be since it is 133X compare to 120X which is slower. The speed improved some when I used camera to format it. So I just continue to shot without any concern since Canon EOS 400D SLR camera does not require very high speed CF card. Until now, I discovered a big surprise…
Hehe… I cannot stop myself from benchmarking all the flash memory cards that I have. I took CF card for my Canon EOS 400D SLR for some tests. One of them is 2GB Transcend 120X Compact Flash Card. Based on Compact Flash (CF) Card X-Speed Rating, 120X should have 18 MB/s writing speed. Let’s see how 2GB Transcend 120X Compact Flash Card performs.
