I hadn’t shopped for SD for quite a while. SanDisk, esp. Extreme series, is considerably one of the most expensive SD in the market. Anyway I got a good deal for SanDisk Extreme III 20MB/s. So I have a quick test to show if it’s really worth premium.
There is nothing special physically as expected, but SanDisk gives us a little pouch and USB card reader in the bundle too. Well, when it comes to performance, let’s see how good it really is.
Performance
SanDisk claimed that this is 133X speed which should be equal to 20MB/s both read and write. We’ll see if that’s true. I will use 2 benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark and AttoBenchmark.
Note: I tested with Thinkpad X61T internal SD card reader, the performance drops about 2MB/s overall.
As you see, read performance is almost the same on both class 6 SDHC, but sequential write performance on Sandisk Extreme III is so much better than regular class 6 SDHC.
Atto benchmark gives basically the same info [you may click to see full screen capture of Atto’s]
Conclusion
It might not up to 20MB/s for both read and especially write speed, but that’s up to many factors. By the fact that I use Thinkpad X61T as a testbed could be one big factor here, but it’s proved that Sandisk Extreme III has something extra to offer indeed. For digital camera, this might be very helpful reducing writing time since it’s going to be pretty big file anyway. If you got a good deal, you shouldn’t miss this.