OCZ Secure Digital Dual Memory Card

Yep, it goes both ways.  On the opposite end from the SD connection leads is the USB end.  The lower half of the unit snaps on and off with minimal effort.  It is tight enough to keep you from worrying that it will fall off but not so tight as to be bothersome.

The last shot we have is of the OCZ SD Dual card plugged into the USB port on my laptop.  With the lower section removed providing access to the USB connector, the OCZ memory card is now even smaller; not much larger than one of the keys on the keyboard itself.

Performance

Testing today will be from two angles; the first being benchmarking from the SD connection and the other from the USB connection.  This will be an apples to oranges comparison for the Secure Digital portion of testing.  This is because we don't have a collection of 2GB SD/USB flash drives here in the shop to do a true point to point direct comparison.  We do have a few other units in the shop of varying sizes to use; a 512MB Swissbit and a SanDisk 256MB Micro drive.  I don't see this as a bad thing because we have all heard about large capacity flash drives being slower than their smaller counter parts.  When I'm shopping for a flash drive I'm looking for something of at least a certain size in a certain price range.  Meaning, if I need at least 256MB then I really don't care if the unit I get is 256MB, 1GB or 2GB as long as it does the job well and is within my budget.

The second comparison will be the unit installed in a device and its speed via a USB connection cable.  Our device for this will be my Minolta Dimage Z6 camera with a comparison unit being a RiData 1GB 66x SD card.

Results

Using the HD Tach program to measure random access time (ms), maximum burst speed (MB/sec) and average transfer speed we get a good look at our OCZ Secure Digital Dual unit's performance with it connected directly into a laptop's USB port.

That's not bad at all, not lightning fast but not bad at all.  With an average speed of 13.5 MB/sec transfer that works out to be about 800 MB/min.  Let's graph our results for the USB connection for the OCZ unit as well as the Swissbit and SanDisk flash drives we have here. 

Keep in mind that our OCZ is an 80x speed unit while our SanDisk and Swissbit cards are older technology.  Corsair has a 133x speed flashcard giving you some perspective over the advances since the 60x units of not too long ago up to now.

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