CARDSPEED - Card Readers and Memory Cards

Transcend 266x High Speed CF 8GB (TS8GCF266)

For general information and other test results, see the overview  UDMA CompactFlash Cards .

2007-05-18: I received the order with the Transcend 266x High Speed CF 8GB (TS8GCF266). With the USB 2.0 UDMA readers, the card shows about 31MB/s read and about 23MB/s write. That's not bad, but to make use of the full performance, you need other interfaces.

Specifications

Model: TRANSCEND
Firmware: 20070319
Type: CF Removable (848A) + ATA Fixed (044A)
CF-ATA Modes: PIO-6, MDMA-4, UDMA-4
Memory Mode: 80ns
Size: 8153284608 Bytes ~ 7775MB ~ 7.59GB
Sectors/CHS: 15924384 Sectors = 15798/16/63

Test Results Read Write
FireWire CF Reader 45.26MB/s309x 35.92MB/s245x
CF SATA Adapter 45.11MB/s308x 36.60MB/s249x

CF FireWire Reader

2007-05-20: With the FireWire 800 card readers, the card shows excellent results: 45.26MB/s (309x) read and 35.92MB/s (245x) write.

The test setup:
Transcend 266x High Speed CF 8GB (TS8GCF266)
Hama 55352 CF FireWire reader, Oxford FW 912 controller
TI TSB82AA2/TSB81BA3 FireWire, TI OHCI 1394 Driver
Read/Write directly from/to the media, no filesystem involved
Read/Write rates taken with a sample size of 4MB, 1944 samples

Transcend 266x CF 8GB Read/Write, CF FireWire

CF to SATA Adapter

The card also shows good results with the CF to SATA adapter connected to the ICH6R SATA host of my PC. With a CF to ATA adapter that plugs diretly to the connector on the mainboard, the BIOS seems to detect the media, but Windows XP would not boot. Using an older adapter for use with a regular ATA cable, Windows XP did boot, the media was detected, but the read operation caused a lock-up. Using the ICH6R ATA connector mounts the card as primary disk, but my test program currently has a safety feature that prevents writing to the primary disk, so it's time for another modification. Please note that this is how my adapters behave when connected to my PC. I can't tell how your adapters behave when connected to your PC. OK, enough talking, now it's time to present the test results...

The test setup:
Transcend 266x High Speed CF 8GB (TS8GCF266)
CF to SATA adapter with Marvell 88SA8040-TBC1 controller
ICH6R SATA Host
Read/Write directly from/to the media, no filesystem involved
Read/Write rates taken with a sample size of 4MB, 1944 samples

The test with the CF-SATA adapter showed an average rate of 45.11MB/s (308x) read and 36.60MB/s (249x) write. Please note that CARSDPEED always states memory size and byte-oriented transfer rates caclulated on a binary basis. The scale was chosen to leave some room for direct comparison with other cards.

Transcend 266x CF 8GB Read/Write, CF-SATA


Hans-Jürgen Reggel   ·   http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/   ·   2007-05-18 ~ 2007-09-28