Test Freaks wrangled as many flash drives as they could and ran them through an oddly intense testing regime, finding out that your choice in USB stick brand may actually matter.

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That Eye-Fi technology we were so gung ho about a few months back, the one which adds Wi-Fi to any digital camera, has found a new home in Lexar. The memory card giant is churning out a 2GB Shoot-n-Sync WiFi SD card that works exactly the same as the Eye-Fi Share. But with the Lexar branding, I guess these cards will be guaranteed a much larger audience. They'll be available in October for $US99.

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Crucial issued a press release today announcing their forthcoming line of Solid State Drives, but it appears to be the same news we covered in November. [Crucial]

Review by Gizmodo contributor Curtis Walker SDHC, or Secure Digital High Capacity, finally lets SD break the 2GB barrier and compete with Compact Flash for capacity. Only a handful of new devices are compatible with SDHC, and there's really no support for legacy gear. This means you can't even put them into your computer's SD card slot. You need a special reader which, most cards come with. As grim as that sounds, SDHC is a welcome step-up for people who have newer DSLR's like Nikon's D80 or video recorders like Canon's high-def TX1. I entered nine of them into my own personal laptop-and-camera Battlemodo arena to determine compatibility and raw blistering speed.

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We had a sit down with the Lexar folks at PMA to catch up on their latest offerings, and picked up a few interesting tidbits you may not have known:

• Their new 300x gear is FAST. 45MB/s fast. And Lexar was keen to point out they don't play with "up to" rubbish either. They rate their cards based on minimum sustained speed ratings.
• Their pro cards come with Image Rescue 3, so you can recover lost/deleted images (and audio and video files) from memory cards of any brand using any reader. Nice. They also come bundled with Corel Paintshop Pro 10.
• Their thumb drives are all chromed and sexy. And the Mercury has an e-Ink usage meter that shows how much capacity is left.

A few more bits on their UDMA compatible readers after the jump.

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Lexar's ExpressCard solid state drive is an interesting proposition: 4 to 16 gigabytes of non-volatile memory in a slot form factor. That's not only more storage than typical USB flash drives can offer, but more than most based on microdrives can, too. For those with lappies with ExpressCard slots, it would seem like a sweet piece of storage, and even as a cache for Vista's ReadyBoost, since its not hanging off the side of a laptop like a USB thumbdrive would. So what's the catch?

Unfortunately, I found write performance to be a lot lower than I'd have liked.

It read a fair 15MB per second on several machines, confirmed using both synthetic and MP3 file copies. But only wrote at 3MB per second.

For comparison, the laptop drive in the DV9000 HP Pavilion churned about 30MB per second in both reads and writes, and the Lexar Lightning, the fastest USB drive I had on hand, scored 17MB and 14MB per seconds in reads/writes.

In a nutshell, write speeds really need to be much better before I can recommend it.

–Brian Lam

Home Page [Lexar]