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Revival of the Compact Flash cards ... Adata and Kingston  introduces CF cards with 266X speed! 

INTRODUCTION 

In recent months, sales of flash memory, including USB flash drives and SD cards of various sizes have been on the rise. This is all thanks to the explosion of mobile phones, smart phones, cameras and now netbooks. With so many people using USB flash drives and SD cards, it's not surprising that Compact Flash cards are almost forgotten these days. But believe it for not, sales of CF cards are still strong among digital photographers and PDA owners.

Having said that, the technology behind Compact Flash cards have been around for quite some time. To certain people, Compact Flash is dated technology and for others, USB flash drives and SD cards offer more compatibility. So what have the producers of Compact Flash cards done to combat this. Adata and Kingston are among a handful of manufacturers that are still producing Compact Flash cards for the die-hard digital photographers and PDA owners. They have now introduced higher capacity and higher speed Compact Flash cards, with speeds of upto 266X.

Speeds of CF cards are determined by several factors, including the X-speed. X-speed is also known as the write speed, and this is usually what users are generally more concerned about ... it's the time it takes to write data to a Flash card when used in a digital camera or cell phone. Typically, read speeds are higher than write speeds for Flash cards, so the write speed is more useful when measuring performance. The table below shows the typical speed of most CF cards, measured in X-speed and also in mb/sec. As an example, a Compact Flash card that is rated at 266x will translates to a write speed of 266* (150 KB/sec.) meaning 39,900 KB/sec or 40 MB/sec.

To take FULL advantage of these new higher speed 266X CF card, make sure you have a USB 2.0 card reader that supports these higher speeds. An older 5-in-1 card reader might not support these higher speed cards, as I have found out ... only giving us a maximum transfer rate of 7.5 Mb/sec (that's 50X speed). You can buy a higher-spec 15-in-1 (or more) card readers that support 266X CF cards at most computer stores ... if not, you can always try Ebay.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at Compact Flash cards from both Adata and Kingston. These CF cards support the higher speed of 266X, and both offer storage capacity of 8Gb. We'll be comparing the two cards to see which one offers the best value for money.

In order to test these Compact flash cards, there's only one thing to do ... and that's to use a digital camera that supports CF cards. In our tests, we used our trusted old Canon EOS 300D digital camera, which we still use to this date. Using the internal menus on the camera, we firstly formatted the CF cards to see what the total capacity was. Later, we took random photo shots to fill up the CF card. And boy! believe me, it's more difficult than it sounds. I literally took around 200 photos per day, for a whole week ... and it didn't even fill 1/4 of the CF card. This is with the camera set to take photos at the maximum resolution with superfine details at 6 megapixel per photo.

OK, let's take a closer look at the specifications and the CF cards itself ... starting with the Adata Turbo CF 266X 8Gb.