Performance

This card offers two ways of connecting it to a PC, you can either go for the classical way by inserting it into a SD-card reader or you can choose to remove the protective cap and insert it into a USB 2.0 port. I have benchmarked this card in both scenarios and put it up against my A-DATA reference card and the new A-DATA infoSD 512MB SD-card.

To test the capabilities of it connected via the SD port I have used a SanDisk 12 in 1 card reader which is isn't a bottleneck for performance since it can cope with almost 40MB/s bandwidth. To bench the memory cards I have used HDTach 2.7 which is a really good benchmark program that not only measures the bandwidth of the card but also calculates CPU usage and access time of the card.

In order to test the cards with different transfer sizes I have used ATTO benchmark system which generates multiple scenarios with different chunk sizes and measures the read and write performance of the card.


The average read speed of the OCZ card is almost as good as my ADATA 1 GB reference card. It's close to performing the acclaimed bandwidth of 80x (12 MB/s) in the HDTach benchmark.


When it comes to latency the OCZ card falls a bit behind its A-DATA rivals, whether this is due to the implementation of a USB port is unknown but the latency is high compared to the other SD cards.


Above you can see the complete performance analysis after my HDTach 2.7 test of the card. The read speeds across the entire medium are uniform and the latency is average for a SD-card.


One of the nice things about the OCZ Secure Digital Dual 1 GB is that it offers roughly the same performance whether it's connected via USB or an SD port.


The left image shows a screenshot of the ATTO benchmark while the card was connected through an SD-card reader. The read speed tops out at about 14 MB/s which is good for a card rated 80x. The right picture shows the same benchmark done while the card was connected through a USB 2.0 port, the results were almost the same but the write speed was a full 2 MB/s under what the card is capable of connected via an SD-card reader. On the other hand the read speed is a bit better when the card is connected via USB 2.0 but it's with such a little margin that nobody will ever feel the difference.