A word about commercial SD & CF cards.
Always check the format, better yet always format your own cards even when new.
About a year ago, I bought a new SanDisk 1Gb SD card and a SanDisk 2Gb Ultra II CF card, which are -supposed- to have 10Mb/sec read/write speeds - at least according to the claims on the package, and several benchmark sites.
Plugged in the CF and ouch.... it dragged my X51v down to a crawl.
Running benchmark tests using Pocket Mechanic, Spb Benchmark, and even SiSoft Sandra on the desktop all yield similar results - the Ultra II is only getting speeds in the 1.5-2Mb/sec range..... all tests were run on clean cards and on a variety of hardware - my internal card reader on the PC, and external SanDisk ImageMate 12-in-1 USB reader, and in the X51v itself.
I returned the card to Circuit City and exchanged for another - guess what.... same results.
Then I came across a great app. CNetX Flash Format. [
Flash Format ] - no I don't work for them.
It -properly- diagnosed & formatted my storage cards, based on size and application (ie, camera, PDA, MP3 player, etc.), and yes, it does matter what you're going to use it for... The vendors have no idea what you plan on doing with it. so they give all their cards a generic or "lowest common demoninator" format.
In my case, it recommended:
SanDisk 1Gb SD card - should be FAT16, 16Kb cluster size
SanDisk 2Gb Ultra II CF Card - should be FAT 16, 32Kb cluster size
Apparently both cards when new, already came formatted as FAT16, but with cluster sizes twice as large as what FF recommended:
- the 1Gb SD was FAT16 / 32K
- the 2Gb CF was FAT16 / 64K
I let FF do it's thing and performance on BOTH cards improved dramatically, and by that I mean by at least a 300% increase in R/W speeds... according to Pocket Mechanic's benchmarks