To check how fast this SD card from Kingston is, I place together a SanDisk CF card in my Toshiba e830, with SD card and timed the move of a DivX compressed episode of Trailer Park Boys: "Mr Lahey's got my porno tape."

The CF card took seven minutes and fifty five seconds to write 109MB file. The Kingston SD card took almost two minutes less to do similar operation, turning in a five minute and fifty eight second performance. For read operations, positions were much closer. Actually CF card won by ten seconds, sending 109MB file back to PC in 6:30, while the SD card took 6:40.

What this must tell you is how painful it can be to fill up a 512MB card, or utilize it to move files back to PC if you plan to use it as a storage device that is pulled frequently. Erasing the card is much quicker, almost immediate operation. You must expect to spend about half an hour if you want to fill whole card in one shot. This is one of selling points for getting a quicker "ultra" speed card if you can give to do so. Many of those say to have an 8-9MB/s transfer rate, apparently much higher than that of two cards we utilized for testing now.

What does Kingston 512MB SD card gives you is cheap storage, and large amounts of it. You can purchase up to 1GB models, something that was not available until now. This does put it at less of a disadvantage size wise compared to options available to CF. If you have a camera phone which supports SD, or an MP3 player, it's hard to argue against what this product has to offer. Don't anticipate roaring transfer times.