Lexar Media | Crucial 4Gb Lexar Media Professional Udma 300X Compactflash Cf4Gb-300-380

Excellent performance | Crucial 4Gb Lexar Media Professional Udma 300X Compactflash Cf4Gb-300-380

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	• Crucial 4Gb Lexar Media Professional Udma 300X Compactflash Cf4Gb-300-380 CRUCIAL TECHNOLOGY CRUCIAL TECHNOLOGY average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fastest CF card we've ever used in a camera, BUT WE LIKE IT MORE TO BOOT XP /GREAT SSD ALTERNATIVE !

NOTE: This reviewer used an Addonics SATA adapter to facilitate booting XP (IDE version picture / visit their web site for the SATA version ) Dual Slots Cf HDD Adapter.

+++ PROS +++
1. FASTEST CF CARD ON THE MARKET AS OF THIS DATE
2. TYPE 1, thinnest form factor for easy fit into any CF camera or adapter -including all PCMCIA adapters
3. Lifetime Warranty, Lexar does have a reputation for card failures but their replacement procedure is fairly easy, much easier than trying to get an iPod replaced by Apple.
4. Fairly inexpensive for an 8GB card
5. Increase the speed and authenticity of your notebook for sales or technology demo's since running this CF on SATA is comparable to an enterprise server as far as Disk I/O

-- CONS --
1. HARD TO THINK OF ANY NEGATIVES IF USING IT FOR A CAMERA CARD
2. If using it to boot your XP system partition, remember that CF suffers from wear limits, typically 100,000 writes will "burn out" the flash cells, BUT WEAR LEVELING is supposed to mitigate this so that writes are equally distributed across the entire card, this is similar to comparing how mustard is evenly spread across a sandwich w/o poking a hole in the bed.

-+-+- Comprehensive Comments / Instructions -+-+-
First, let me appeal to those that want to use this card for their cameras and confirm your hopes and suspicions that is YES it is superb, the write speed at RAW and JPG are glorious ! This is a Type1 card means it is the slimmer form of CF versus the thicker TypeII (Many CF microdrives are TypeII to support the mechanical parts and can be used for comparative reference). Since it is Type1 it is practically guaranteed to physically fit into any CF ready camera.

Because this card runs at 45 Megabytes per second (300 x 150KBS = 45,000,0000 bytes per sec or 45MB) this is between an older IDE ATA33MBs or ATA66MBs, these disks were cutting edge in 1996 and common by 1998. Combined with an Serial ATA interface that can support 100MBs at most optimum conditions and this card can provide comparable performance to a 5,400 RPM hard drive that uses a lot more voltage and drains your battery faster.

It reads data extremely fast and the writes are superb. It really excels in the area of power consumption since it extends our battery life by at least 33% under the heaviest CPU and disk loads. Using a basic test of running a notebook PC on highest LCD brightness and w/o power saving features such as hard disk power off or suspend / hibernate and WiFi increased our battery lifespan by 45% under normal usage.

Despite the lower 45MBs access time, the this setup still runs faster than our 5400 and 7200 RPM SATA drives, remember that I/O is dependent on many things such as simultaneous operations, type of I/O such as intensive video and audio such as a game or database. For business use such as editing documents, web browsing and watching hosted and downloaded YouTube Video, this card still exceeds our hard drives. It is unlikely you will be able to use this card for booting your XP system and playing a contemporary video game because 8GB isn't large enough to hold both.

If your system can support multiple hard drives you can load more than one of these and use XP to create RAID arrays or leverage the BIOS if your hardware provides the functionality. Addonics also makes a PCI 4 CF card RAID controller ( also at their website ) but this won't fit inside a notebook.

Your notebook will also run cooler which also consumes less fan power and extending your battery.

XP Installation Tips:
Some of these can also be found at Addonics web site
1. Disable XP Prefetching, this is a function of Windows that copies certain application executables in directory inside the c:\windows directory. This supposedly helps XP load and run faster, but this seems bogus since XP can load the files just as quickly from the original location you installed it to.. PREFETCH JUST WASTES HARD DRIVE SPACE IT ALSO CREATES UN-NECESSARY WRITES TO YOUR CF CARD.

Delete all the files in the %systemroot%\prefetch hidden directory then modify the Registry and choose 0 for the new value or pick one of the others.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
0: Disable
1: Application Launch Prefetch
2: Boot Prefetch
3: Prefetch everything

2. Disable the XP Indexing service, this also creates un-necessary reads and will shorten the lifespan of your CF card. Disable the CISVC (Indexing Service). If you insist on indexing, consider Google Desktop instead since it has more options which are easier to modify so it won't constantly thrash the partition, also it can search more types files than XP indexing service.

3. Disable any background optimization such as automatic disk defragmentation, spyware or anti virus scans, again these are un-necessary disk access activities that will shorten the lifespan of your CF drive.

4. Disable the pagefile, if your system has at least 1GB of RAM than you'll have less of a need for a pagefile, if you have 2GB than you may not need one at all. Our 2GB and larger equipped systems don't use pagefiles no matter what kind of hard drive they have since we never exceed 2GB of activity and we aren't running multi user severs which really benefit from Windows paging. NOTE: This will add an extra second to boot up since XP looks for pagefile.sys and will respond with a popup at logon about "missing pagefile... blah blah blah"

5. Use ghost or other type of drive cloning application to copy your existing installation to the CF card, this preserves your settings and saves time from having to reinstall XP just for the CF card. If your system partition exceeds 7.8GB uncompressed, than we suggest the following steps:
A. Create a clone of your existing partition to a second hard drive large enough to copy your data.
B. Trim down the XP installation, move non application files such as MP3's, videos's, office / productivity documents to a data partition separate from where you install XP.
C. Wipe out un-necessary junk files that Windows is famous for, you can wack out the %systemroot%\*KB*Uninstall directories and any ServicePack Archive directories. The *KB*Uninstall files are the older / replaced versions of files that Windows Update has replaced because they were vulnerable to security attacks / hacks and are kept just in case you want to uninstall the patches and return back to your vulnerable state. (ROTFLMAO) -those directories just by themselves are often worth about 250MB of space.
D. Install FolderSize from SourceForge, it can be used to display your folder size in Explorer w/o having to right click / properties every one and displays it and sort it like any other characteristic. Start exploring these directories for hidden junk you don't need, Dell is notorious for burying blotware and source installers in places like this.

If you're still over the size limit, then start uninstalling applications which you can deem un-necessary or can reinstall to a traditional 2nd hard drive. This defeats many of the reasons you chose CF to begin with since the system still requires a HDD and the power and latency burden.

NOTE: If you already have two partitions on your system and the others are used to house applications, it is recommended you uninstall the applications that reside on the data partitions and reinstall them to your %systemdrive% so you can avoid having to use a traditional HDD at the same time.

6. Clone the trimmed build then replicate it over to the CF card

7. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, WHEN BOOTING THE CF CARD FOR THE FIRST TIME, ENSURE IT IS THE ONLY HARD DRIVE IN THE SYSTEM AND THE ORIGINAL SOURCE DRIVES ARE ABSENT. If the CF card is booted with the source HDD's, XP can become confused and still draw resources from the other drive letters if you have configured for multiple partitions and at the least, will create / use the pagefiles left remaining on the originals. In some cases, especially with multi-partitions, you could end up binding to the originals, then when you try to boot just the CF, it won't have the other source drive letters for applications and can end up in a loop or Logon/Logoff loop after successful authentication.

That scenario will drain so much time to fix so many issues in the Registry and configuration files, that you're better off just starting over.

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Lexar Media

I have been using Lexar Compact Flash in my cameras for years. Unfortunately, this one did not work in my camera. However, I will continue to purchase Lexar products.

Excellent performance

The Lexar Professional UDMA 4GB CompactFlash card is awesome. Plenty of storage space plus superb speed.

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Very satisfied

I started using Lexar 1GB 80X then I purchased a 2GB 133X Now I have the 4GB 300X and I'm very satisfied. I'm using them in my D70 for now.

I have and will recomend this to my friends.

Super speed

I use this card in my Sony Alpha 700. There is a huge difference in camera performance and in uploading to my computer using this card compared to slower speed cards. Your camera or device must be capable of using 300X or you won't get full benefit from this card. Check your device documentation before you spend the premium price for a 300X card.

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UDMA CompactFlash (CF) technology provides the ultimate high-speed memory card performance for professional photographers and photo enthusiasts. The Lexar Professional UDMA 300x memory card dramatically increases card-to-computer transfer rates when paired with an UDMA-enabled Firewire 800 Reader. This provides support for the next generation of high-resolution UDMA-enabled digital SLR (DSLR) cameras. The Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CF card provides advanced memory card performance so you can focus on the business of photography at incredibly fast download speeds to satisfy the demand for faster transfer rates from card to computer, drastically reducing post-production time. These cards deliver industry-leading read/write speeds with a minimum sustained write speed capability of a blazing 300x (up to 45MB/sec).

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