Transcend 8 GB 133x CompactFlash Memory Card TS8GCF133
by TRANSCEND
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List Price: Our Price: $12.90 You Save: $30.09 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Transcend 8 GB 133x CompactFlash Memory Card TS8GCF133
Customer Review: Good value all around. Used as an alternate laptop hard drive.
Summary: 5 Stars
Anyone that gets a 133x card instead of a 233x pretty much knows what they're getting. [...]
The rated 20MB/s speed is enough to use as an alternate hard drive with a CF-to-IDE adapter. Going from pressing the power button on my laptop to being fully loaded at the desktop (cpu idle, no processes loading) only takes 10 seconds! Battery life was also extended roughly 30 minutes to an hour, since not only is there no hard drive spinning, I've locked down most system writes to only the essentials as well.
Keep in mind I'm using WindowsXP Embedded features and a custom setup. Installing regular windows on this card and expecting it to run fine will cause it to lock up and stutter constantly, as well as completely trash your card in record time from disk writing. Unless you are willing to invest some serious time in to getting it running perfectly and have the technical know-how, I do not recommend trying this for the average user. I managed to burn out a few of the sectors on the card being careless and doing a live setup of XP to integrate the embedded features, instead of setting it up on a virtual machine and prepping the card, but that's the price I paid for being lazy and not too much harm done.
In retrospect, getting a 233x card would have been a much better option, but the 133x is definitely up to the task of turning my old laptop into a speedy web browser and portable music player (through Winamp Remote). Being out around town and stopping in places with free WiFi access was the driving factor, which meant boot times has to be as low as possible. [...]
For anything more than browsing though, definitely without a doubt invest in a higher-speed card if your budget allows.
Customer Review: Slow write, fast read. Get a cup of coffee!
Summary: 4 Stars
Bought this card in a combo deal with a CF-HDD adapter. Therefore, I'm using it as a cheap SSD for an old laptop. Works, but random write is pretty slow, as expected. Multi-Level-Cell (MLC) cards like this one have a tough time getting decent speed with random writes so combine that with the card's automatic wear leveling and an NTFS file system, and it's gonna take a while to get anything done. Installing Windows took over two hours. I knew that coming into this since I didn't want to shell out loads more money for less space and figured I could deal with the slowness. But god it's so much slower than you think once you get using it.
Read speeds, though, are pretty fast. Since access time is instant, that takes most of the delay out of loading Windows or other operating systems since it's just a bunch of tiny files and a 10 ms seek time on a typical HDD limits it quickly. This card doesn't have the fastest sequential read speed out there, but unless you're loading major files such as video or enormous applications, things should be OK. Though if you're looking for performance or have a newer computer, don't buy this over a full-blown Solid State Drive. It's not worth saving the money unless you have an old computer lying around with a fried drive.
Also, to those who use these as hard drives, I *strongly* suggest ridding yourself of the swap/paging file in any operating system if you have the RAM to spare. Keep the thing as read-only as you can. It'll significantly boost your performance.
The reason this doesn't get a 5/5 is because its write speed is far slower than I was expecting. I was expecting slow, but not practically floppy disk slow.
Customer Review: This card is actually Class 4, 26x.
Summary: 1 Stars
This card is not 133x (Class 20). It is Class 4 at best. Now I see how they can sell it so cheap.
I suspected something was wrong at first when I was recording paltry 640x480 video on my Canon 5D.. This is a 2MB/s task.. I got the little 'buffer filling' warning on the right hand side of the display, indicating the card was not keeping up with the bit stream! What the heck!? This is ridiculous for x480. A good rule of thumb for compressed video is 2Mb/s for 480P, 4Mb/s for 720P, 8Mb/s for 1080P. Find those numbers any number of places. 133x should give me 20MB/s+
So, sick that I had just wasted my money, I plugged the CF to my PC and ran CrystalDiskMark with a 50MB file size, representative of a RAW+JPEG write. To my shock and horror, the card is a CLASS 4! (26x). Ran it again simulating a video stream, same result. Now I understood why the card could not keep up with my Canon DSLR.
I posted the picture proof in the 'customer images' go check it out. If you have an older camera or only need x480 this card would work; but will you patronize a company that lies to you?
Unfortunately, shipping is more than the cost of the card; I'll keep this as an emergency backup for when I forget my quality card.
Customer Review: Not just for cameras anymore
Summary: 5 Stars
I like to tinker. I bought one of these, hoping to swap out the 4 Gb Microdrive in my RCA Lyra mp3 player. Also bought some different CF-to-IDE adapters to try. Ultimately, I wasn't able to get it to work in the RCA player (they really boogered-up the microdrive when they designed the player). All was not lost, however...
The drive comes formatted, with a single Fat 32 partition. I Ghosted the microdrive and ended up with a 4 Gb partition on the Trancend card, which still didn't work in the RCA. Not to worry. I learned that my iPaq pocket PC has a Compact Flash slot, and makes an excellent 4 Gb mp3 player. Using an adapter (also purchased here on Amazon), I was able to plug the drive directly into an IDE header, and use a W2K install CD to re-partition and format a new 8 Gb FAT 32 partition. I was AMAZED at how fast the drive partitioned and formatted. (The drive's paperwork states that it supports Ultra33 IDE speeds - not blazing speed, but not bad, either.) As soon as I finish loading the drive again, I will have an excellent 8 Gb mp3 player.
Bottom line? Excellent value for the price. Will work fine for all but the most demanding applications.
Customer Review: Defective unit and Customer Service did not fulfill their promise
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this compact flash card with enough room to store all my vacation pictures and not need to have them downloaded from time to time to a CD. The unit arrived and I installed it, tried a couple of pics and worked right so I went on vacation. When I started to use it for real pictures, after the fourth or fifth I got an error "data corrupted" and the pics where missing. I lost 50% of the pictures I took.
As I had disposed of the original shipping documents I thought there was nothing I could do so I simply told my story in the Seller Feedback page. Then the seller "Thememstore" contacted me by email and asked me to call them back. So I did and they told me they would send me a prepaid return envelop and that they would reimburse me upon receipt. I told them I was going to be in Miami (gave the correct address) for a week and that I would need to receive that during that week because after that I would return to my home country (Argentina) and would loose any chances of returning it, but they assured me that I would receive the return envelop.
Unfortunately I did never receive the envelop, so I could not return the unit...