Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
I decided to use several readers in this testing session to check out my supposition that the performance of a memory card may vary between card-readers as well. As you will soon learn, this supposition was confirmed. But let’s first examine the devices I plugged those cards into:
Lexar Media FireWire RW019
This single-format card-reader (supports CompactFlash media) is among the fastest devices of its class today – no wonder many flash cards had the highest speed in it. The enclosed interface cord is rather short and thin, but I didn’t try the reader with another cord.
SanDisk ImageMate 8-in-1 USB 2.0
This device is a multi-format USB 2.0 card-reader of an original design. You can use it in two ways: mobile and stationary. In the first case, the reader unit can be taken off the docking station and used independently with an interface cord. Or it can be plugged into the docking station with its USB port.
There’s a common opinion that universal card-readers are slower than single-format ones and that FireWire devices are faster than their USB 2.0 counterparts. Of course, I can’t make any generalizations comparing just two devices, but anyway I can say that that opinion is not always true.
So, let’s run some benchmarks.