I had noticed some big differences when transferring files to my different memory cards.
So, I figured that I'd see what others are saying. After a google or two, I found this forum (among others) and lots of opinions on which memory is best for my iPaq 2215. It seems that more people think CF is better, but there are plenty that claim SD is better.
I decided to test the memory I have to see for myself. What I found is a bit strange.
I have two Hewlett Packard 256MB SD cards. One SanDisk 256MB SD card. And one SanDisk 256MB CF card.
The HP SD cards won my little competition. The SanDisk CF card was not too far behind. But the SanDisk SD card was put to shame.
The SanDisk SD card was especially bad when writing to the card from the iPaq's main memory, with PPC2003 File Explorer. The SanDisk SD took an appalling 1143 seconds to write a 20MB file, while the other 3 cards did it in just over 100 seconds.
The SanDisk SD wasn't that far behind in the rest of my tests. But it was the slowest every time.
OTOH, the HP SD cards were great. They beat the SanDisk CF almost all the time. The biggest spanking came when I was reading the cards with a SanDisk 8n1 reader connected via USB2.0. It took 34 seconds to read 232MB from the HP cards. It took 55 seconds to get the same file from the SanDisk CF card.
The SanDisk CF outshined the rest in one test. Reading the same 232MB file from the card, with the 8n1 reader connected via USB1.1, it took 114 seconds. The HP SD card was much slower at 246 seconds. I will be using USB 2.0, so that don't mean much to me.
I created an Excel file that has graphs of each test, if you are interested. Get it .