Amazing Capacity: The Test of Seagate 8GB CF Photo Drive
www.it168.com, China (29 March 2006)
Seagate has recently released two mini-drives of high capacity (4GB, 8GB), the models ST64022CF and ST68022CF respectively, which have adopted the 1-inch hard disc drive ST1.2 as the kernel, and CF II as the package interface, with a speed of 3600rpm and cache memory of 2M. What we received in the IT168 Test Center is a 8GB product of model ST68022CF.
Compared with similar mini-drives currently on the market, the most remarkable features of this drive are the built-in 2MB cache memory, the 1500Gs non-operating and 200Gs operating shock tolerance. These features have rendered the mini-drive improved practicability.
Tests on Compatibility and Practical Applications:
This drive can be used only in cameras that simultaneously support CF TypeII store card slot and FAT32 file format because it adopted CF TypeII interface and FAT32 file format. Seagate has posted a list of cameras that are compatible with the drive on its official website.
But since this list used the data by Nov of 2005, it is quite possible that some new cameras are not included in the list. We have tried our best to find newly released cameras for our test and it turns out that this drive can be used in EOS 1D mark II N, EOS 5D and EOS 30D of Canon, Nikon D50 and Konica Minolta Dynax 5D cameras for normal operation.
The test of mobile storage capability
In the test, we used Sandisk High-Speed USB2.0 card reader and 3 kinds of routine test software: ATTO Benchmark, SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2005.SR3 and HD Tach3.0.
The performance of the product is just so-so in the Sisoftware sandra 2005 SR3 test.
The HD-Tach is a test software dedicated to the underground performance of the drives, which measures the sustained transfer rate, random access time and burst transfer rate by means of copying data of various capacities section by section into the drive.
It can be seen from the test result graph that the score curve of the product is a straight line, a constant in 4.7MB/s.
The ATTO is the software published by Microsoft for testing the storage performance, which makes use of test data packages of 4M to perform read/write tests according to the size of the files, and graphically displays the test result, so that the result is clear at a glance for the users. In this part of the test, for comparisons with the drive under test, we used a common Sandisk 1GB CF card and a high-speed Sandisk 1GB CF card, as well as a high-speed 80X LEAXR 1GB CF card.
The test result shows that the read/write speed of this 8GB mini-drive basically keeps balance with the 1GB UltraII CF card of Sandisk, but somewhat lags behind the LEXAR 80X professional card that has better performance.
Test of practical applications and experience thereof
In this part of the test, we measured the speed of file write-in and the speed of actual shoot and store using Canon EOS5D camera, a common Sandisk 1GB CF card and a high-speed 80X LEAXR 1GB CF card are used for comparison.
In this test, for the file write-in speed measurement we chose CD mirrors of 680MB and 4.2GB respectively, as well as small files with total capacity 500MB. It took 2 minutes 57 seconds for writing the 680MB CD mirror, or equivalently the speed is 3.84MB/s; 14 minutes 18 seconds for writing the 4.2GB CD mirror, or in its equivalent the speed is 4.9MB/s; and 4 minutes 20 seconds for writing the 500MB scattered files, or in its equivalent the speed is 1.92MB/s.
We also measured the actual shoot and store speed using this mini-drive along with a Cannon EOS-5D camera during the test, in which we use the EOS-5D camera to perform continuous shooting and other operations, the results of actual test and comparisons are as follows.
This mini-drive behaved very well regarding noise control, no audible noise of the disc rotations was detected during the whole course of the test. The noise could be heard only as you kept your ear very close to the drive body. The temperature control is even better, the outer cover of the drive was only slightly warmed after frequent read/write operations lasted for several hours.
Remarks of the IT168 Test Center: Advantages in capacity and price, a good partner for digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera.
Although it lagged behind high-speed CF cards with certain gap in power consumption and read/write speed etc, this 8GB mini-drive is much ahead of high-speed CF cards with the same capacity in regard to performance/cost ratio. In our opinion, this mini-drive is a real bargain with a price of about US$249.99 and a capacity of 8GB. We recommend you to take this ST1.2 series mini-drive product into account if you have a plan to buy a digital SLR camera and if you have rather high requirement for storage capacity.
Advantages: 8GB capacity, heat dissipation lower than similar products
Disadvantages: The compatibility to certain kind of digital cameras not good enough.
www.it168.com, China (29 March 2006)
Seagate has recently released two mini-drives of high capacity (4GB, 8GB), the models ST64022CF and ST68022CF respectively, which have adopted the 1-inch hard disc drive ST1.2 as the kernel, and CF II as the package interface, with a speed of 3600rpm and cache memory of 2M. What we received in the IT168 Test Center is a 8GB product of model ST68022CF.
Compared with similar mini-drives currently on the market, the most remarkable features of this drive are the built-in 2MB cache memory, the 1500Gs non-operating and 200Gs operating shock tolerance. These features have rendered the mini-drive improved practicability.
Tests on Compatibility and Practical Applications:
This drive can be used only in cameras that simultaneously support CF TypeII store card slot and FAT32 file format because it adopted CF TypeII interface and FAT32 file format. Seagate has posted a list of cameras that are compatible with the drive on its official website.
But since this list used the data by Nov of 2005, it is quite possible that some new cameras are not included in the list. We have tried our best to find newly released cameras for our test and it turns out that this drive can be used in EOS 1D mark II N, EOS 5D and EOS 30D of Canon, Nikon D50 and Konica Minolta Dynax 5D cameras for normal operation.
The test of mobile storage capability
In the test, we used Sandisk High-Speed USB2.0 card reader and 3 kinds of routine test software: ATTO Benchmark, SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2005.SR3 and HD Tach3.0.
The performance of the product is just so-so in the Sisoftware sandra 2005 SR3 test.
The HD-Tach is a test software dedicated to the underground performance of the drives, which measures the sustained transfer rate, random access time and burst transfer rate by means of copying data of various capacities section by section into the drive.
It can be seen from the test result graph that the score curve of the product is a straight line, a constant in 4.7MB/s.
The ATTO is the software published by Microsoft for testing the storage performance, which makes use of test data packages of 4M to perform read/write tests according to the size of the files, and graphically displays the test result, so that the result is clear at a glance for the users. In this part of the test, for comparisons with the drive under test, we used a common Sandisk 1GB CF card and a high-speed Sandisk 1GB CF card, as well as a high-speed 80X LEAXR 1GB CF card.
The test result shows that the read/write speed of this 8GB mini-drive basically keeps balance with the 1GB UltraII CF card of Sandisk, but somewhat lags behind the LEXAR 80X professional card that has better performance.
Test of practical applications and experience thereof
In this part of the test, we measured the speed of file write-in and the speed of actual shoot and store using Canon EOS5D camera, a common Sandisk 1GB CF card and a high-speed 80X LEAXR 1GB CF card are used for comparison.
In this test, for the file write-in speed measurement we chose CD mirrors of 680MB and 4.2GB respectively, as well as small files with total capacity 500MB. It took 2 minutes 57 seconds for writing the 680MB CD mirror, or equivalently the speed is 3.84MB/s; 14 minutes 18 seconds for writing the 4.2GB CD mirror, or in its equivalent the speed is 4.9MB/s; and 4 minutes 20 seconds for writing the 500MB scattered files, or in its equivalent the speed is 1.92MB/s.
We also measured the actual shoot and store speed using this mini-drive along with a Cannon EOS-5D camera during the test, in which we use the EOS-5D camera to perform continuous shooting and other operations, the results of actual test and comparisons are as follows.
This mini-drive behaved very well regarding noise control, no audible noise of the disc rotations was detected during the whole course of the test. The noise could be heard only as you kept your ear very close to the drive body. The temperature control is even better, the outer cover of the drive was only slightly warmed after frequent read/write operations lasted for several hours.
Remarks of the IT168 Test Center: Advantages in capacity and price, a good partner for digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera.
Although it lagged behind high-speed CF cards with certain gap in power consumption and read/write speed etc, this 8GB mini-drive is much ahead of high-speed CF cards with the same capacity in regard to performance/cost ratio. In our opinion, this mini-drive is a real bargain with a price of about US$249.99 and a capacity of 8GB. We recommend you to take this ST1.2 series mini-drive product into account if you have a plan to buy a digital SLR camera and if you have rather high requirement for storage capacity.
Advantages: 8GB capacity, heat dissipation lower than similar products
Disadvantages: The compatibility to certain kind of digital cameras not good enough.
