I ran some benchmarking utilizes to see how fast this drive is, but I’m not sure how accurate the numbers were, so I’m not going to list them. They ended up being all over the place, and each test disagreed with every other test. Therefore, I ended up using a stopwatch to see how long it took to transfer a file from my computer to the memory card. I realize that this is dependent on the speed of the memory card, but I figured that I could compare what the card is rated at to what it is actually running at to get some idea of what’s going on. The numbers were actually pretty consistent. I only have one card that would work in the drive that has a rating on it, so that’s the only one I’m going to use for this comparison.

My SD card has a rating of “150X” on the front of it. If you don’t know, the X speed measurement means “150KB/sec.” I’m going to assume that they mean it’s rated at 150X read speed, since that’s usually the fastest one, so 150X would then mean it can read at 150 x 150 kilobytes per second. Multiply that by 1MB/1024KB and you’ve got about 22MB/sec read speed. From multiple tests with many differently-sized files, I’ve come to find that my card reads 11MB every second. That’s half of what it says it’s rated at. Now, I know there are lots of factors that would change this number, such as my RAM and Bus speed, processor speed, hard drive speed, operating system, etc. so I’m not disappointed. I decided to do the same tests using my older flash card reader, and it ended being exactly the same. From that, I’ve decided that the card reader has little influence over the transfer speed compared to all the other factors. Therefore, this card reader is as fast as it should be. If something here doesn’t make sense, let me know.

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