Product Reviews

Several types of Flash memory cards are now available in high-speed versions. Costing around 40 per cent more than standard cards, they're a tempting purchase for anyone who finds transferring data a tedious chore. The quoted sustained write and read speeds of Kingston's Elite Pro are three and five times those of its standard SD cards. We tried the two versions in a range of devices.

When reading from cards there was no discernible improvement. Writing was quicker, however. We got 40 per cent faster writes in a Hi-Speed (USB2.0) card reader, could take a third more 4-megapixel photos per minute using our digital camera's burst mode, and, most impressive, archiving files to the Elite Pro stuck in an HP iPAQ h4150 was three times quicker. Be warned, though: if your USB card reader isn't Hi-Speed then the speed boost writing to the Elite Pro media will be paltry.