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The demand couldn’t be greater for high volume SDXC cards with professional DSLR cameras transitioning from from larger CompactFlash memory cards to SDXC cards. My camera is the Canon EOS 6D and, considering the space saved in moving to the smaller card, one might believe that two SDXC slots would have been an ideal trade-off. Manufacturers recognize that media professionals would pay the price for high speed and high capacity SDXC cards and the Patriot 128 EP Pro SDXC card fits that space perfectly.
The EP Pro is Patriot’s premium offering and available in capacities of 32, 64 and 128GB. The EP Pro has a Class 10 rating and specifications list speeds as high as 90MB/s read and 50MB/s write. It is also speed rated at u1 (UHS-1) and capable of shooting full 3D video at 1080Presolution, or up to 4K resolution in 2D.
A quick check of Amazon
Our initial testing of the Patriot EP Pro was conducted with ATTO Disk BenchMark, a tool that manufacturers use to determine product performance specs. As much as it does provide the highest performance normally available, it does this through the sampling of highly compressible data which is not really indicative of media as we might see using this type of device.
Our ATTO results surprised us somewhat as specifications list a high of 90MB/s read and 41MB/s write. These are still excellent speeds and this SDXC card still meets it’s classification requirements of Class 10 and U1, hoewever, we expected to see read performance in the 90MB/s area.
Crystal DiskMark confirmed what we had seen in ATTO, only using incompressible data representative of such media that would be used with the Patriot EP Pro SDXC card. This benchmark provides an excellent representation of what this card is meant for and that it is large media files that would represent high sequential transfers. Low 4K performance has no use in most media devices.
Last but not least, Quickbench gives us yet another confirmation that the Patriot EP Pro 128GB SDXC card is more suited at 50MB/s write and 30MB/s read transfer speeds, which is the standard for most in any case.
FINAL THOUGHTS
As much as performance might be looked at as the ultimate gain in SD cards, capacity is right there as well. It is actually pretty remarkable to think that you could get somewhere in the area of 64000 2GB pictures or 32 4GB HD movies on a storage medium this small. We have to wonder if anyone has filled up a card this size in a day or even a week of photography and video?
Check Out Patriot EP Pro SDXC Card Pricing at Amazon.
“It is actually pretty remarkable to think that you could get somewhere
in the area of 64000 2GB pictures or 32 4GB HD movies on a storage
mnedium this small.”
It is actually pretty remarkable to think that you could get somewhere
in the area of 64000 2MB pictures or 32 4GB HD movies on a storage
medium this small.
Since ATTO seems to be the gold standard when testing new flash memory/SSDs where did Patriot get their speed claims from? 50MB/s compared to 90MB/s is over 50% slower than their claimed speed.
Thank you for that correction and we can’t answer that. We often find that with these types of storage different PC configurations may result in different results.