Kingston 512-MB microSD Memory Card Review
Performance Testing
Legit Reviews has previously published two articles on microSD memory and if you would like a background please feel free to refer to those articles.
The latest Kingston Technology microSD card is nothing more than a capacity increase for the Kingston microSD memory line. With a 512-MB capacity (478-MB usable space) it doubles the capacity of the 256-MB card that was launched just in January 2006.
When it comes to benchmarking we compared the Kingston 256-MB microSD card to the 512-MB microSD card. Since it is hard to benchmark these cards on our phone we used the Kingston 15-in-1 Flash Memory Reader and ran the flash memory test found in SiSoft Sandra 2005.SR3 to get read and write performance numbers.
When reading various size files on the MicroSD card it is obvious that the new512-MB card has higher transfer rates. When reading the 64MB files the Kingston SDC/512 operates at 62x where the Kingston card tops out at 49x. In the 512B test the cards were nearly identical with the read difference increasing as the file size increased. Let’s take a look at the write scores.
When it comes to the write scores Kingston SDC/256 had faster write speeds across the board. When writing a 64MB file the Kingston 256-MB card was able to write at 31x compared to the 18x on the 512-MB card. The decrease in write speed might might be due to changes in the manufacturing process to reach the 512-MB density.
To confirm our Sandra benchmark results we also ran HD Tach which shows sequential read speeds.
In HD Tach we found the burst speed of the 512-MB microSD card to be 9.0MB/s, which was .2MB/s above the 256-MB Kingston microSD. The 512-MB microSD card had an average read speed of 7.6MB/s versus the 8.6MB/s found on the on the 256-MB card. Both cards ran at 4-5% CPU utilization with random access times of just over 2ms.
Let’s wrap up our thoughts on the Kingston 512-MB microSD Flash memory card.
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