Compact Flash Showdown – Lexar vs Sandisk

By Jonathan

For all of our photographer viewers, The Tech Lunch did a side by side comparison of Lexar vs Sandisk. The winner is clear, but we were surprised by how much.

For the first comparison we used a MacBook Air with the Lexar Professional UDMA USB 2.0 Reader. This reader is by far my favorite out there. Its a very quick reader that feature both a SD and Compact Flash slots. We tested both manufactures latest and fastest cards. The compact flash cards tested were the 2GB Sandisk Extreme IV and the 4GB Lexar Professional UDMA. We did the same tests with a Sandisk card reader, but got worse test times. The Lexar card reader was significantly fast for both brands of cards.

Results:

Sandisk write time: 2 minutes 14 seconds

Sandisk read time: 1 minutes 29 seconds

Lexar write time: 1 minute 49 seconds

Lexar read time: 1 minute 17 seconds

The clear winner is Lexar.

*Due to the Macbook Air’s slow hard drive, we will be conducting the same tests using a brand new iMac later on this week*