Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Large Capacity, Fast read time, great price, June 15, 2008
I bought two of these for a couple of old iPod mini's we had sitting around. Because these CF cards are directly compatible with the CF form factor that iPod uses, I figured it was worth the chance to try them. I had experienced complete success with installing a 16gb CF card, also made by the same company, and it works flawlessly in the iPod, so it seemed like an easy decision to upgrade the remaining two iPods even further.
Since I can now fit 30 gigabytes of music on the iPod mini, it not only allows a bigger selection, but longer battery life, mostly because the CF card uses a fraction of the energy of the old CF mini-hard drive (which was only 4 gigabytes).
This is winner all the way around. I don't know how well it works for a CF-slot camera, but the card has been working without a hiccup in the iPod for a couple of months now. It never skips, is immune to vibration, and can be filled to the maximum without any slowdown.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A little bit slow, but outstanding value for money, October 11, 2008
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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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cheap, works OK with Dell x51v, November 29, 2008
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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