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1. Introduction - Specifications

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Transcend Secure Digital 256MB 45x - Page 1

Introduction

Transcend was founded back in 1988 and evolved along the consumer electronics market into one of the bigger memory suppliers. Today they market thousands of memory and portable storage related products, but also a line of Radeon graphic cards.

was kind enough to send us a sample of its ?Ultra Performance? 45x Secure Digital Memory card for testing.

The 256MB module is intended to be used with digitals cameras, PDAs, mobile phones and portable music players featuring an SD or MMC memory slot. The line features storage capacities from 128MB and up to 1GB.

Package Contents

The memory module comes in a blister package that also contains a quick installation guide, the warranty card and a matched protective carrying case.

Specifications

The claimed speed rating of 45x, (45x150 kb/s = 6750 kb/s) equals to a more than acceptable Read/Write performance, reaching 7.7/6.8 MB/s respectively, according to the manufacturer that is. But will real life performance prove these ratings?

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2. Tests - Conclusion

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Transcend Secure Digital 256MB 45x - Page 2

Test Layout

For the test we used a USB 2.0 memory card reader by Extreme Memory, utilizing a SMSC USB97C223-NE-04 memory controller. Since there isn't any proved memory card benchmarking tool out there, we have chosen to use our good old chronograph and time the seconds required to complete read and write operations via windows explorer. The file used throughout the reading and writing performance tests was an exact 100MB RAR file (104.857.600 bytes).

The test machine was otherwise consisted of a P4 2.8 GHz CPU, 1GB DDR400 and a WD 2000JB HDD running Windows XP SP1.

Test Results

As seen by the above chart, the Transcend memory card easily outperforms the Traxdata memory cards, even the higher rated 52x Compact flash module. Off course none of the tested cards could match the manufacturer rated speed, not even by far, but this isn’t something new.

The “45x” rated Transcend card is more like a “41x read/34x write” one, but still these figures are more than adequate for the average user, amateur or professional. In digital cameras, write speed is the more important, as it defines the rate data flows from the camera’s buffer to the storage medium. In this department the Transcend SD 256MB 45x card really stands out of the competition.

Conclusion

The Transcend Secure Digital card really impressed us by achieving the higher Read and Write performance of any flash memory card we have tested up to date. It should be more than sufficient for even the most demanding portable storage applications. Thumbs up!

The price of the Transcend 256Mb Ultra Perf 45x Secure Digital (SD) is around € 62,00 (incl. VAT) and can be purchased at: