Flash Drives vs. Memory Cards

Since writing my previous post about memory devices I tested a class 2 (probably) Sandisk SD card from a digital camera vs. my Lexar flashdrive using the free XBench software. I was using my MacBook Pro for the tests and just plugging the Sandisk card into the SD slot on the laptop. Here are the results. First the flash drive:



And here is the memory card:



Data can be read faster off this flash drive than off the memory card but writing to the memory card is faster than to the flash drive. This greater uniformity of read-write speeds seems to be a feature of memory cards. These speeds seem to be reflected in real world applications. It takes a lot longer to copy files to the flash drive than vice versa. The MacBook's hard drive is mostly faster than either portable device: