» A-Data Speedy 32GB Compact Flash

A-Data Speedy 32GB Compact Flash Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Cheap, works OK with Dell x51v
Comment: I bought this primarily to expand the storage capacity of my Dell x51v PDA, and it works fine except that it sometimes requires a reset of the PDA to recognize the compactflash. However, this is more likely a PDA problem rather than a problem of the compactflash.

Overall, this this an excellent buy and is much cheaper than other equivalent brand-name products.

I have not used it with a digital camera and therefore have no idea whether it is fast enough for digital photography.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: quite satisfactory . . .
Comment: I had no experience with A-Data products, and their reviews were a bit spotty, but because of the low price, I decided to take a chance on this high capacity card. I have primarily used it in Canon's EOS 40D digital SLR camera, shooting RAW files at the highest quality.

The performance of this card has been quite satisfactory. When shooting at a normal rate, no delays wiring to the card were experienced. When shooting sports in the high speed mode (6 frames per second), it does take a little while to save images to the card, however the buffer and transfer speed of the 40D are such that the camera is able to continue to shoot in most cases. Shooting the highest quality RAW files with the 10 MP 40D, the card will hold about 1700 images. Expect performance to vary, depending on your camera.

As megapixel counts continue to rise, higher capacity cards will become more common, and cheaper. This card has already dropped over 30% in price since I bought it a few months ago. If you want an inexpensive high capacity card, this could be it.

Generally, the Memstore has low prices and fast delivery times, however Amazon's shipping policies provide no incentive to buy multiple items. Buying memory only when you really need it, can be advantageous, as prices continue to trend downwards.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: I like it!!!!
Comment: Is great to be able to keep all your music collection in your Pocket PC. This card is pretty slow when loading, but no problems when playing the files.

I had to return one of them because it didn't work. The store changed it with no problems.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Awesome Compact Flash!
Comment: This 16G compact flash is awesome! It works extremely well in my Ipac hx2410. I just plugged it into my PDA and it saw it! I didn't have to format the flash drive or anything, it was ready to go! I recently went on vacation to Washington DC and downloaded all my pictures onto the flash drive every day so that the pics would all be in one place. I got home and retrieved the pics with my home PC and all worked out terrifically! I would definitly recomend this product! Very easy to use and tons of room! Very fast as well! For the money I definitly got more than my monies worth!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A little bit slow, but outstanding value for money
Comment: I got this CF three months ago for over $100. Now it is under $70. As soon as it goes down to fifty, I'll buy another one to keep as a spare in case of accident.

True, it's very slow to transfer files from laptop to CF using an old PCMCIA adaptor. It took over three hours to copy 8 Gb of music and over two hours for 5 Gb of audio books from my laptop to the CF placed in a PCMCIA adapter.

However, I tried using a Sony multi slot Card Reader to transfer my video folder and it took only 25 minutes to copy 8 gigs of video. That is, six times less than what it took to transfer the same amount of gigs in audio files using the old PCMCIA adapter! The problem is therefore the PCMCIA solution. I now use the multi slot Card Reader when I have to transfer files between the laptop and the CF.

For those who don't know it, a full DVD will be reduced to a small size once encoded to PPC format with Windows Media Encoder (FREE from Microsoft website): a 4 Gb DVD converts to only 200,000 KB once encoded to Pocket PC in wide screen. Renee Fleming's wonderful DVD called "Sacred Songs" was reduced to a mere 177,000 KB; Andre Rieu's DVD "In Wonderland" weighs a little bit more than 220,000 KB and the French film "Cyrano de Bergerac" with Gerard Depardieu (over two hours long) is under 220,000 KB. That's an average of five full films or DVD concerts per gig!

All in all, this card is a great choice because it lets me have 25 gigs of music, audio books (the full version of Don Quijote's audio book in old Spanish, parts I and II, is 996 MB, but most audio books are less than 100 Megs and all 48 chapters of Victor Hugo's "Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné" weigh a mere 128 MB) as well as films, plus 5 gigs of all my personal files in mi pocket thanks to my HP IPAQ 2415. Hundreds of films, CDs, books and files in my pocket!

And trust me, 5 gigs of personal files, that means thousands of files: several big Word files (my 622 pages Ph.D. dissertation -which fits in one floppy of 1.4 Mb-, plus my two published French books and several articles, plus the Spanish translation that I made of my last book, and hundreds of smaller Word files); in addition: dozens of Excel files (all my students' scores since I bought my first PSION in 1988, all in my pocket!); plus Access files (addresses, hotels, restaurants, cafés, etc.) converted to my PDA format thanks to this wonderful software called "Data On The Run 5"; plus miscellaneous PDF, all my agendas since 1988, the Microsoft (free!) Pocket Encarta plus MS English, French, Spanish and German dictionaries, plus E-books in English, French and Spanish, plus a selection of photos and scanned documents!

All that in my pocket! Do I want to return to that small coffee place in Santiago de Chile where I had a delicious espresso with a glass of sparkling water served by beautiful young women in miniskirts in 1990? I consult my pocket secretary (my French students called her PSION predecessors "Mimi" in the 1980s and 1990s), open my "Cafes" file, type "Santiago" and I'll find the address right away. Maybe it no longer exists, but chances are it will still be there! Flying to Paris and needing the schedule of bus 350 from De Gaulle airport to Gare de l'Est? "Mimi" is in my pocket with the answer. How about finding that hotel facing the port in Oban, Scotland, in 1997? I open my "Hotels" file, type "Oban" and voilà. I can even know what room I had and how much I paid for it. Priceless!

Naturally, I take off the CF from the PDA periodically, place it into the multi slot Card Reader hooked to my laptop and run a backup into a Toshiba 320 Gb pocket drive. When there is an accident or when I buy a new card, all I have to do is transfer the files from the previous one backed into the hard drive, which is what I did when I replaced my old AData in 16 Gb by the new one in 32 gigs.

Before you go, let me draw your attention on the "micro drives", which are sometimes advertised as "Compact Flash". I was once misled by this erroneous advertising and purchased a Seagate 8 Gb micro drive a couple of years ago, trusting the publicity that said "Compact Flash". Although it works fine on my PDA, it drains almost twice as much battery power as a Compact Flash card because of the moving parts. So I only use it in my laptop, which is plugged to an AC outlet most of the time, using a type 2 PCMCIA adapter made by Hitachi.

Therefore, if you are using a battery operated device, avoid "micro drives" and stick to real slim Compact Flash Type 1 cards like this AData (I have two, in 16 and in 32 gigs, and they are both excellent). When I walk along the beach "reading" a book on my PDA with noise canceling ear buds, the CF consumes less than 10% battery power per hour of listening; the same action using the micro drive will drain around 18% for the same audio book or the same music.

I am now waiting for the CF in 64 gigs (which was advertised longtime ago) to hit the market. But I'll wait until it sells for under $100. I expect this to happen no later than Black Friday... of next year, 2009. All we need is just to wait patiently for about thirteen months!

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