I discovered an excellent compilation of benchmarks for compact flash and SD memory. The article not only benchmarks a huge range of flash memory brands, it also tests them on multiple cameras and on multiple card readers. I was amazed that when you combine the SanDisk Extreme Firewire Reader with SanDisk Extreme IV Compact Flash cards, you can get read speeds of 38MB/sec, which is over twice that of every other card reader. Apparently, this is because only this reader and this line of compact flash cards supported UDMA4, which was added to the compact flash standard.

• RobGalbraith.com Article
  • Compact Flash Benchmarks
  • SD memory benchmarks

For comparison, you can also look at these benchmarks using VFSMark, which benchmarks flash memory on Palm PDAs.

It is disappointing to see that a RAID-0 (striped) array of two usb 2.0 flash drives maxes out at 14MB/sec for reads, when a lot of the card readers in Rob Galbraith's article could get 16MB/sec from a single compact flash or SD card.