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SanDisk ratchets up the speeds on its Extreme series

SanDisk has announced the world's fastest CompactFlash (CF) cards for professional photographers with its Extreme IV series. The new 2GB, 4GB and 8GB Extreme IV CF cards can deliver read and write speeds of up to 40MB/sec and can operate in temperatures of minus 13 degrees F to 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

The company also released a new Extreme FireWire 800/400 reader that is capable of handling the 40MB/sec read and write speeds of the new cards. And to prove that the 40MB/sec top-end is no joke, Rob Galbraith was able to put the new cards to the test and achieved some tremendous results:

Did we mention how fast the Extreme IV cards are at card-to-computer transfers? Here's a taste: the best CompactFlash cards on the market now are capable of real-world throughput between about 15MB-17MB/second in the best shipping readers we've tried. By comparison, the SanDisk Extreme IV 2GB, when inserted in an Extreme FireWire Reader, tops out at a whopping 38.6MB/second, with the Extreme IV 4GB weighing in at 38.4MB/second. These aren't synthetic benchmarks, but the actual speediness of Extreme IV when moving JPEG and RAW picture files to a Power Mac G5 here.

The 2GB, 4GB and 8GB SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards will be available this month for the price of $159.9, $319.99 and $639.99 respectively. The SanDisk Extreme FireWire reader will be available this month as well for $79.99.

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Speedy, but who uses compact flash?
By Fox5 on 7/20/2006 1:08:42 PM , Rating: 1
Come on, how long until we see this flash memory in SD cards and USB flash drives? With Vista's Readyboost functions taking advantage of flash storage as virtual memory, a 40MB/s flash drive would be very nice.




RE: Speedy, but who uses compact flash?
By AmbroseAthan on 7/20/2006 1:22:07 PM , Rating: 2
Just to answer your topic question: almost anyone who uses D-SLR Cameras, such as the new Nikon in the article below. I know the Nikon D200, with Raw+Large format on is ~20MB a picture; and being it can crank out 5 shots a second, the faster CF cards can buy some extra buffer space for a few extra continuous shots.


RE: Speedy, but who uses compact flash?
By TomZ on 7/20/2006 2:03:17 PM , Rating: 2
...not to mention the importance of fast upload times when dealing with large numbers of 20MB files.


By AmbroseAthan on 7/20/2006 2:57:34 PM , Rating: 3
I always just go and make a sandwich while I wait; nice break from the work!


RE: Speedy, but who uses compact flash?
By mindless1 on 7/20/2006 6:04:53 PM , Rating: 2
It'd be a complete waste of money, there are no USB controllers that can reach 40MB/s with ANY kind of drive. Only benchmarks that don't isolate caching from the results imply otherwise.

If you want to run flash over USB, nobody was stopping you yesterday or today.

Flash storage as virtual memory is very slow. It wouldn't be nice at all, it'd be a very expensive way to get worse performance.

If you want peak performance, don't try to tack on extra bottlenecks. THIS card is far faster than what you're suggesting and RIGHT NOW can be used in a CF-IDE adapter, and will be far faster than any USB2 flash device mankind will ever make, because USB2 will never be anything but a low-end sluggish interface. Note that even when sandisk made a special reader they still went with firewire.


RE: Speedy, but who uses compact flash?
By Fox5 on 7/21/2006 1:41:12 AM , Rating: 2
1. SD cards don't have to use a USB interface.
2. USB's performance is greatly affected by the USB controller in the system. There's room for improvement, possibly even to the point where the full speed of this flash memory could be utilized.


By mindless1 on 7/21/2006 7:48:33 AM , Rating: 2
So you're pretty much agreeing that yes, USB2 can't be used for full throughput and that there would have to be fundamental changes (which would tend to be called USB3) before it could ever hope to utilize it.

There is no reasonable expectation USB2 will be improved. It is what it is, a low cost serial interface for the masses.



CF RAID
By hannons on 7/20/2006 11:56:37 AM , Rating: 2
All that's needed now is multiple SATA to CF adapters + RAID capable MB to have a decently FAST, SILENT SSD(not cheap at $640/per).




RE: CF RAID
By dgingeri on 7/20/2006 12:19:02 PM , Rating: 2
I've seen IDE to compact flash adaptors, perhaps combining that with a SATA adaptor or on an IDE RAID controller. it seems a bit overdone in that case, though. the best to hope for is 32GB with about a 100MB/s transfer rate. Not really enough for a DVR. Not really enough for much beyond Windows XP MCE. Perhaps useful for just the OS of a DVR system and keep the DVR data on a quiet drive.


RE: CF RAID
By highlandsun on 7/20/2006 4:42:01 PM , Rating: 2
Ah, makes me want to dust off my old laptop with two PCMCIA slots and stick two of these cards in PCMCIA adapters...


RE: CF RAID
By ElFenix on 7/20/2006 11:59:27 PM , Rating: 3
iirc, pcmcia is ridiculously slow.



CF is built to IDE spec, very little in the way of hardware is needed to convert. in fact, it may be as simple as a pin adapter.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...
that one looks like it just plugs into the IDE port on the motherboard


RE: CF RAID
By highlandsun on 7/21/2006 3:35:39 AM , Rating: 2
16 bit PCMCIA may be slow, but most laptops that have these slots today are 32 bit Cardbus, which is 33MHz, same bandwidth as PCI - 132MB/sec. CF and PCMCIA are pretty much identical, just needing a physical socket adapter, so I'd expect to get the full 40MB/sec throughput here, with even lower latency than going thru the Firewire bus and external reader.


expensive
By juancferrer on 7/20/2006 11:45:48 AM , Rating: 2
I guess most people don't really need this kind of speed. Only professional level stuff. I guess that's why it has the professional level price.

quote:
The $79.99 SanDisk Extreme FireWire reader will be available this month as well for $79.99.


redunant?




RE: expensive
By lifebread on 7/20/2006 11:52:45 AM , Rating: 2
not exactly redunant, the author is just trying to emphasize how expensive the reader is =P


RE: expensive
By highlandsun on 7/20/2006 4:47:05 PM , Rating: 2
What's really interesting to me is that the prices are pretty much linear. I.e., the 8GB card is almost exactly 4x the cost of the 2GB card. Usually for products made with higher density components, the high density parts cost much more than a linear multiple over the lower density parts. This tells me they're doing something new and different here.

If the 8GB card just contained 4 of the 2GB chips, it would still need extra control logic to talk to 4 chips vs 1. Either that, or all of the cards are built with the 4 chip controller, and the 2GB card is just using 1 chip, with the remainder empty.

Curious...


RE: expensive
By mindless1 on 7/20/2006 5:57:27 PM , Rating: 2
Have you checked flash prices recently?

While it used to be true that higher density commanded a premium, now the price:capacity is pretty linear from 2, 4, 8GB cards.

On the other hand, what was always unusual was just how expensive Sandisk's cards were. While these new models are great for their speed, the Ultra and ultra II were really getting to be a ripoff, quite overpriced relative to other cheaper yet faster cards.


RE: expensive
By Souka on 7/21/2006 9:05:44 AM , Rating: 2
Say Hello to Windows Vista.... you can use theses types of cards to expand your RAM. And lets not forget a virtual drive.

Good option for temp file, or possibly even swap file, useage.


Where has Rob been?
By mindless1 on 7/20/2006 6:18:44 PM , Rating: 2
Rob Galbraith's article seems to imply this card owes it's success to the UDMA4 capability of the card, and that this is *new*. In actuality, anyone can go to newegg/etc and buy UDMA4 capable cards for much cheaper. They're CF3.0 spec'd cards. They aren't as fast as this Ultra IV, but I find Rob's comments puzzling, as if he doesn't know half as much about CF as it seemed.




RE: Where has Rob been?
By Googer on 7/21/2006 12:34:26 AM , Rating: 3
ROB was referring to the UDMA on the Firewire controller/reader.


RE: Where has Rob been?
By mindless1 on 7/21/2006 7:57:05 AM , Rating: 2
That's possible, but the statements recurred within an article about the media itself and no direct comparison at that time with other cards in the UDMA capable reader.

IMO, this is just a case of first to market, that if you're itching for the speed increase right now you'll pay a pretty penny for the Sandisk combo but if you wait a few months someone else will have similar performance at significant cost savings. I think the numbers speak for themselves here, Sandisk's cards already in the market were priced at a premium and $80 for the reader- WOW that's excessive for what a reader is. We could argue it's due to R&D costs but so it goes with the $10 readers too.


New Flash?
By rrsurfer1 on 7/20/2006 12:26:29 PM , Rating: 2
Wonder if these are using the new Samsung OneNAND with vertical packaging. Anyone know?




RE: New Flash?
By PT2006 on 7/20/2006 12:43:27 PM , Rating: 2
It's possible, but not likely. Sandisk uses Samsung memory, but the density isn't really necissary here, since you have a lot of space to work with in an SD card.


PC CF reader performance w/ FireWire
By abakshi on 7/20/2006 2:40:51 PM , Rating: 2
The review basically says the USB 2.0 reader isn't capable of transferring anywhere close to the Extreme IV's max data rate. They haven't tried running a PC with a built-in FireWire port (though a PCI card should theoretically provide identical performance if the integrated chip is on the same bus).

It'd be interesting to see more info on PC performance with the FireWire reader (the only PC tested there is a P4 3.4 / 945P) vs. the various Macs -- why are the MBPs so much slower transferring under XP SP2 vs. OS X, etc. - driver issues?

Also, I found it a bit interesting that the tests show transferring to a server via GigE to be significantly faster than transferring to a local HDD.

In the case of the MBP's, that's a 5400 RPM local drive, but even with that, how can a transfer from the reader to the network card through the system, then through network, to the file server (which they don't elaborate on, but presumably is RAIDed, etc.) NIC and then to hard drive, be so much faster than transferring to a local HDD (in MBP, 29.4 vs. 19.4 MB/s under WinXP)?




By TomZ on 7/20/2006 3:04:19 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
In the case of the MBP's, that's a 5400 RPM local drive, but even with that, how can a transfer from the reader to the network card through the system, then through network, to the file server (which they don't elaborate on, but presumably is RAIDed, etc.) NIC and then to hard drive, be so much faster than transferring to a local HDD (in MBP, 29.4 vs. 19.4 MB/s under WinXP)?

The delays you're envisioning are latency delays which don't affect how long it takes to push files onto a server. But the total latency for a file isn't relevant here, and the server is faster because it can handle faster bandwidth/throughput than the local HDD.


i like it
By TK2K on 7/21/2006 5:15:09 PM , Rating: 2
well i like it, i just got a extreme 3, and its really a huge upgrade from my 10mb card. its amazing how much of a difference it really does make




i like it
By TK2K on 7/21/2006 5:15:09 PM , Rating: 2
well i like it, i just got a extreme 3, and its really a huge upgrade from my 10mb card. its amazing how much of a difference it really does make




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