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1. Introduction - Specifications

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Traxdata CF and SD Memory card - Page 1

Introduction

Traxdata, worldwide known for its optical storage products, is now also active in the flash memory market. The memory card line includes all popular formats, like Compact Flash (CF), Secure Digital (SD), MultiMedia Card (MMC) and Smart Media (SM), featuring storage capacities ranging from 32MB and up to an impressive 4GB per card.

Package Contents

Traxdata cards come inside a clear blister package containing nothing but the card and a protective case for it. What’s interesting about the cases is that they can accept both CF and SD cards at the same time. Thus is possible to carry two different types of flash cards inside the same case.

Specifications

In this review we’ll test the two most popular formats among digital cameras and handheld devices: Compact Flash and Secure Digital. Both cards have a storage capacity of 256 MB (256 million bytes to be exact), while the CF card has an impressive manufacturer rating of 52x or up to 7.6MB/sec transfer rates.

These claims seem to be a bit too optimistic as our experience implies, but our actual speed tests are going to judge this.

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2. Tests - Conclusion

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Traxdata CF and SD Memory card - 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

It is clear that the Traxdata CF card, which reaches an actual transfer rate 34x/30x for Read/Write operations accordingly, cannot reach the claimed speed of 52x. Nonetheless, these speed ratings are quite impressive when compared to the scores of lower speed rated Compact Flash cards like the Lexar 8x 512MB.

The same goes for the Traxdata SD card, which manages to outperform its sibling by a small margin during Reading operations, while lacking heavily in write speeds. Its performance reached 40x Read and 17x Write.

Conclusion

Traxdata memory cards achieved good ratings compared to similar products unequally priced. The average user should be more than satisfied by the fast read and write speeds they provide, especially the CF card which may appeal even to the professional digital camera user.