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Flash Media Tests
The
I/O Magic Media Station Writer conveniently doubles as a flash media card
reader. Unfortunately, although the drive itself is USB 2.0, the flash
card readers works under the USB 1.1 interface.
After the installation of the drivers, the
individual drives are detected and a drive letter is assigned to each.
We tested this product with all flash media cards except the memory stick
card. These included the following cards:
-Sandisk 32MB MMC
-SimpleTech 256MB ProX High Speed SD
-Lexar 256MB 12x Compact Flash
-SimpleTech 128MB Smart Media
All slots and cards worked well with no issues
to report.
Performance Tests
We used
Sisoftware's Sandra
2004 to measure performance. The first testing module used was
Sandra's File Disk Benchmark.
Sandra 2004 File System Benchmark
Results: 1053kb/s
Again, we
weren't expecting some high transfer rates since the card reader only
supports USB 1.1. The results showed a transfer rate slightly higher
than 1MB per second.
Sandra 2004 Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark
This is a new benchmarking module available in the new Sandra 2004 suite. It
is especially designed for these small media devices. The results are
expressed in both the terms of Operations per Minute and transfer rate in kB/second.
It is based on file operations such as read, write and delete performance.
Results: 608ops
All
tests performed showed a consistent 1MB per second transfer rate just like
the results using the File Disk Benchmark.
Again, this is not a speedy flash card reader, however, I think it is very
convenient to incorporate these two functions into one device.
Considering many who purchase external drives tend to carry them around and
use in different systems, you never know when a card reader would come in
handy.
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