Performance

Performance is one of the downsides of the small form factor. Most of the microSD-cards on the market today have a hard time providing decent read and write speeds. The OCZ Secure Digital Trifecta 1 GB is rated as being 66x speed, which means that the theoretical max. read speed is 9900 KB/s or 9.9 MB/s. A 66x speed microSD-card is nothing out of the ordinary, but then again speed isn't the main goal of the Trifecta card. The Trifecta is by far the most versatile portable memory solution on the market because it's compliant with both USB 2.0 and SD, in addition to microSD.

To test the performance of this particular card I have used my SanDisk card reader. Besides that I have also tested the performance of the card by plugging it into a USB 2.0 port on my PC.



The average read speed of the OCZ Trifecta 1 GB card is almost on pair with the rest of the cards that I have tested. Averaging in at above 10 MB/s is quite good for any memory card with the capacity of 1 GB.



The random access time of the OCZ Trifecta was to my surprise really good. I thought that it would be about the same as the OCZ Secure Digital Dual, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the latency was very low.

In order to test this card to the limit I used the ATTO disk benchmark. This benchmark differs from HDTach because it tests the cards read and write performance with different package sizes.



The left picture shows the Trifecta's performance when connected as SD-card and the right is when connected via a USB 2.0 port. The Trifecta performs almost equally good no matter how it's connected to a PC. Compared to a normal SD-card it's quite a bit slower. Where the OCZ Secure Digital Dual managed to obtain the max write speed of over 9 MB/s the Trifecta only managed a bit over 4 MB/s. A difference of 5 MB/s is highly noticeable when i.e. using a high resolution digital camera because each picture is about 4 MB. The read speed achieved with the OCZ Trifecta is quite good but nothing out of the ordinary.

With the write speed a bit above 4 MB/s this card is well suited for use with a mobile phone because the card won't be the limiting factor since the most mobile phones can't write with a speed above 2 MB/s to a given memory card.