Patriot LX Pro 32GB SDHC
Jun 3rd, 2011 | By JaredWe saw earlier that Patriot has a chart listing capacity of flash memory products but as I saw those are just estimates as I popped the card into my Nikon D40 digital camera I was greeted with a capacity of around 8800 when set to JPEG Fine and large size(3008×2000). If shooting in RAW the numbers drop to an estimate of 4400. This is a 6.0 megapixel DSLR and the LX Pro would hold more pictures than I would know what to do with. As there is no clear picture on the speed of flash memory in the camera, next I am going to line up some benchmarks to see if I can reach the rated speeds of up to 20 MB/s of the LX Pro.
In order to test the LX Pro 32GB, I will be subjecting it to a few benchmarks: IOMeter, ATTO Diskbenchmark and Crystal Disk Mark. I will be using a Kingston Media Reader model FCR-HS219/1 on a Windows 7 Professional PC listed below.
- Control
- CPU: AMD Phenom II 720BE X3 @ 3.2GHz (unlocked to 4 cores)
- MB: Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4
- GPU: Sparkle GeForce GTX465 1GB
- RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws PC3-12800 (F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL) @ 1333MHz 9-9-9-24
- PSU: Antec TruePower 650W
- CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-C12P SE14
- PWM/NB/SB Cooling: Stock/Stock/Stock
- HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 640GB 7200RPM 32MB Cache (ST3640323AS)
- OS: Windows 7 Professional
IOMeter
IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characteristic tool for single and clustered systems initially designed by Intel.
IOMeter is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.
I configured IOMeter to create a 1GB file on the target device and it will pull the performance over 5 minutes and report back the average transfer rate for various block size transfers: 4KB, 16KB and 32KB.
ATTO Diskbenchmark
ATTO Diskbenchmark is an old but popular benchmarking tool. It captures the read and write performance at different transfer sizes for a fixed file size.
Crystal Disk Mark
Crystal Disk Mark tests the read and write speed for a user selected file size at three different transfer rates: sequential, 512K and 4K. I selected a 1000MB test file.
As we can see through the benchmarks the LX Pro clearly delivers beyond Class 10 performance. While I didn’t reach the maximum of 20 MB/s, at an average of 18 MB/s the LX Pro is certainly a speedy memory card.