Lexar recently climbed the speed throne with their 80x professional series and it SanDisk wasn't expected to wait long to wait with an answer. In fact, soon after the news of an unbelievably fast "Extreme III" circulated which was said to support up to 20 MBps or 133x - 'almost' twice the speed! Wow! And here it is ...


Extreme III

On paper the Extreme III is the undisputed champion with an advertised minimum of 20MB/sec sequential write and read speed (Based on 1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes.) This is far more than the 12 MB/sec that the 80x memory is rated at.

Responsible for the speed boost is Sandisk's "ESP Technology" (Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing Technology). Unlike WA (Lexar's proprietary Write Accelleration), ESP appears to be transparent and does not require specific support.

Along the lines of SanDisk Extreme CompactFlash cards, the Extreme III is also tested in temperature ranges from -13 to 185 Fahrenheit so that they can be used to shoot photos in any weather condition, unless your camera is stopping way before that (which is very likely).

By nature Extreme III (as most other CompactFlash cards) are shock and vibration resistant with the housing loosing structural integrity before inducing mechanical failure to the data carriers.

For your peace of mind the Extreme III is backed by a lifetime warranty. Nice to know, especially when you opted for the $400 4GB version, but I have yet a CF card go bad on me to actually appreciate the significance of such warranty. The same is true for the dedicated technical support line for SanDisk Extreme III products even if it receives priority service.

The Extreme III includes a mini-CD for data recovery software to recover photos that are accidentally deleted. RescuePro is normally optional and costs about $50.

As most CF cards, the Extreme III is a CF Type I and that ensures usability in pretty much every CF based device (mostly cameras).


Test w/ Canon's 20D

Capacity: The 1GByte (FAT16) is roughly equivalent to four 36-exposure rolls of film when using the RAW format in the Digital Rebel (6.3 MPx) or three roll in the EOS 20D (8.2MPx). That's interesting for semi-professional photographers and allows 140 pictures or 100 picture respectively in maximum quality and versatility (6.3MPx RAW, 8.2MPx RAW). The 4 GB version is good for 400 pictures in the EOS 20D's RAW format and that should be enough for many applications.

Speed: Data transfer is the major argument for high-speed CF cards and SanDisk's claim to fame. With a proper card reader, the transfer to the computer should be greatly affected. (However, click here to find out why it may not be.) The camera speed is slightly different and factors like image capturing and processing speed as well as data transfer influence the real life performance.

Write Performance: I took 10 consecutive pictures with the EOS 20D in RAW mode with 7.2 MB each and determined the time it took from pressing the trigger until the last picture is written onto the memory card. To my surprise, the EOS 20D returned the exact same performance for all three tested cards. Shooting 10 pictures at 7.2 MB each (RAW) took just about 16 seconds which averages about 4.5 MB/s data transfer, but to be fair that includes acquisition, processing and writing to the memory. In reality, the writing portion should be better. (I verified this by taking 20 pictures. Sure enough all cards came in at 31 - 33 seconds for the whole process.)

- Sandisk Extreme III (133x): ~16 sec.
- Sandisk Ultra II (66x): ~16 sec.
- Lexar Pro 80x WA: ~16 sec.

Read Performance: It's even harder to determine read performance since it's virtually instant and with one picture ranging right around 7.2 MB that seems to indicate higher performance than the estimated write transfer, but that would be a natural anyway.

You can find more on this phenomena ...
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-7303


USB 2.0 CARD READER

So if the camera cannot reap any benefit, a USB2.0 reader should be able to, right? After all, don't they all bear this dream number of 480 Mbps (60 MBps), or 3x the speed of the Extreme III? Well, as already seen in the test of the YD8V07 media reader, the rated speed of a card steps in the background once it crosses the 60x speed rating and limitations on many devices come out. The same thing happened for the Extreme III which tied closely in the Sandra 2005 test for removable media, and one more time proved that speed is determined by the weakest link ...

Sandra2005: maximum Read / Write [MBps]
- SanDisk 1 GB Extreme III: 8.7 / 6.5
- Lexar 1GB CF Prof. (80x): 8.7 / 6.5
- SanDisk 512MB CF Ultra II (66x): 8.7 / 6.5
- Lexar 256MB CF Prof. (40x): 5.5 / 4.3
- SanDisk 256MB SD Ultra II (66x): 6.5 / 5.4
- SanDisk 256MB MS Pro: 8.7 / 3.3


SUMMARY

The Extreme III may currently be the fastest card on the market, but since none of my devices come even close in usable speed, I have to take this at face value.

Compared to a 60x or 80x memory card, most applications will not see a difference in speed. The Extreme III is certainly no card for point'n'shoot cameras as those will not be able to utilize any of the speed provided by these fast drives. Reliability is another question if you really plan to push your camera to those limits.

I am not sure who will currently reap any benefits from the Extreme III other than temperature range and the certainty that 20 MBps will be a tough mark for many devices for years to come. Then again, you could also save the money and for now invest in a 80x or 60x and then jump on Extreme III and up later when it makes sense. However, the price difference is already relatively low.

© 2005, theuerkorn

Recommended: Yes