SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition 4GB and 8GB CompactFlash

From a marketing perspective, SanDisk’s objective is clear: they’re hoping to leverage their two-year sponsorship of the Ducati Corse MotoGP racing team (the press conference will include appearances by two team members, as well as Ducati stunt bike demonstrations). From a performance perspective, SanDisk’s goal is equally clear: with a speed rating of 42.9MB/second for the Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash, vs a 38.1MB/second speed rating for Extreme IV, the company set out to boost performance noticeably over their existing fastest memory cards. But the performance increase is meant to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition

The SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition 4GB and 8GB CompactFlash cards are, in essence, Extreme IV cards with improved controller firmware and slick SanDisk-Ducati branding. They support the same PIO (up to Mode 6) and UDMA (up to Mode 4) data timing modes as Extreme IV, use the same binary memory type and have the same -25°C (-13°F) to 85°C (185°F) temperature range specification. SanDisk’s engineering focus has been on wringing every bit of performance possible from PIO and UDMA transfers, for improved throughput in the many digital SLRs that support PIO, and the handful of card readers that support UDMA.

SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition

And our testing shows that SanDisk’s effort has paid off: In the six Canon, Fujifilm and Nikon digital SLRs we’ve tested so far, both the 4GB and 8GB Extreme Ducati Edition cards are the quickest cards of their capacity in both JPEG and RAW write speed. The lead is small in most cases, owing to the fact that no shipping digital SLR cameras utilize the much-faster UDMA protocol that these cards support. Neverthless, SanDisk’s optimization of the PIO chatter between card and camera adds up to class-leading performance. The Extreme Ducati Edition 4GB, for example, is the only CompactFlash card here to exceed 11MB/second in the Canon EOS-1D Mark III in CR2 write speed testing.

SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition

In card-to-computer transfers using the fastest UDMA-capable readers, we’ve measured up to about a 4MB/second bump in throughput, from 38.3MB/second to 42.3MB/second for the Extreme IV 4GB and Extreme Ducati Edition 4GB, respectively. This bring the performance of SanDisk’s Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash roughly in line with other makers’ top-performing UDMA CompactFlash, but it doesn’t bridge the gap completely. For example, the Extreme Ducati Edition 8GB card trails slightly the UDMA cards of the same capacity from Lexar, Hoodman and Transcend in our testing. The speed differences, however, have minimal real-world significance: all are capable of well over 40MB/second throughput, which is streets ahead of the 15-17MB/second that was tops a little over a year ago.