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How do they put this much "fast" in such a small space?
Despite my overwhelming addiction to all things technological, I've never been that worked up by storage cards. They've certainly come a long way since I first put a 16 mb CF card into my Nikon Di, but the improvements in speed and performance have always been limited by the time it takes to get the pictures from my card to my computer. No matter how fast cards get relative to the speed of a camera, they always seem incredibly pokey relative to the speed of any other peripheral.
Perhaps that's all about to change, thanks to the new SanDisk Extreme IV series of cards and their new Firewire 800 card reader. The combination of superfast card and super-fast reader helps create the most efficient means of image transfer on the market.
The Firewire 800 reader and the Extreme IV cards claim a peak transfer speed of 40 mb/second, which is double what the company announced for their Extreme III cards. We were a bit skeptical. It's not often that a company doubles the performance of a product in a single revision. So we put the new card and reader, as well as a competing card through a battery of tests. We were surprised by the results.
BY THE NUMBERS
Our first test replicated the Compact Flash test we performed in April. We loaded 847 mb of data onto the SanDisk Type IV card and inserted it into the companion FireWire 800 reader connected directly to our test PowerMac Quad GS. (No other activities were running on the machine during any of our tests.) We initiated a file transfer between the reader and the host...