External drive speed test

Since I tested the Compact Flash cards in my previous post, I'll post the test result for my external 1TB WD drive here.
It's now about a month I have it and I have to say I'm really happy with it. It's virtually silent, you can hardly even hear it. After the todays test I can also say it's really fast.
I was just comparing it with a friends 1TB WD My Book Studio Edition and his results are much worse. He gets 42,2MB burst speed and 40,5MB average read speed. So there you go, he paid almost 50% more then I did and mine's better, faster and with 5-year warranty ;)

SanDisk Compact Flash cards and Firewire reader test

It's been an ancient mystery, a question in the history books, a dilemma of all mankind,.. and we're here to answer it.. well, at least in my case and on my machine. Memory cards..
We all have them, we all need them, we all want them more. The biggest (well, not really), the fastest (true, true..), the best (that goes without saying).
I've been a long time buyer of SanDisk. I had their 128MB cards, 256 cards, to the newest 1GB and 4GB cards. I mainly use 4GB cards since I get around 250-300 shoots on one and that for me is the "right" number. If card fails, gets stolen, or something else, I won't die, I'll have stuff on other cards. If that happens to your brand new 16 or ever 32GB card, well, you were warned many times. It really takes seconds to replace a card, why risk it.
Anyhow, I used to use SanDisk USB2 reader and for 1GB card it was ok. When I switched to 4GB I started to notice how long it really takes to transfer pics to PC. TOO LONG. So I switched to SanDisk firewire. Man, it's a joy to watch how pictures just fly into PC. I never really tested how long it actually takes, I know it's long enough for me to get a cup of coffee and that's fine by me. But I've still been curious. So today, after I was testing my new 1TG external drive, I gave my compact flash cards a drive as well.

I used HD Tach and here are the results:

SanDisk CF 4GB Extreme III 30MB version


SanDisk CF 4GB Extreme III 20MB version


SanDisk CF 1GB Extreme III 20MB version


SanDisk CF 1GB Ultra II


You noticed something interesting? I sure did! Ultra II and Extreme III 20MB version are practically identical! That's kinda strange, but I did test it a couple of times.. Extreme III 30MB version really outperforms others, so it's the one I'll stick too for the future.
Hope you learned something as I did ;)