Recently I received two of TopRam’s flash memory modules for review. I’ve used and reviewed a lot of the name brands such as Sandisk, Kingston, et al, but I have also seen TopRam listed in many online reseller’s catalogs at temptingly low prices.
The big question. Do TopRam’s products measure up to similar products from the major players?
Aside from it’s highly colorful sticker, there is nothing in it’s construction that immediately sets TopRam’s SD card apart from any other SD cards on the market. It’s in a black plastic shell with a write lock tab on the side.
However the TopRam SD card has one feature not common among all the other players – a 150x speed rating for reading from the SD card. This translates to a transfer rate of 22.5MB/s in read operations. Other cards, such as those from Pretec who released the first 4gb SD card, are only 133x.
In many operations this isn’t necessarily a huge difference, but if you’re using your SD card in a PDA, Cellphone, or Digital Audio/Video player this speed can mean a lot when playing back video as you can encode your video to higher quality. Of course loading programs from the SD card as well as music and photos will be sped up as well.
I’ve used TopRam products in my Cingular 2125 (MiniSD) and in my Palm PDA (SD) for months now and can report zero problems. I’ve played music and video on the phone and PDA and never had a read error or any write errors. I swapped the SD card from my PDA to my Kodak digital camera on a vacation and took hundreds of photos without a single glitch!
TopRam also provide an ongoing support/sales service to anyone interested in their products in the form of charts that show all devices reported to work correctly with their flash ram products. With companies like TopRam providing larger and larger capacity, this is important as many SD using devices support 2gb at the most. Sometimes even less.
TopRam’s US headquarters are in Fremont, California. While you can find their products online at many resellers, you can also find them on their own website at www.topram.com
Pros: Fast. Reliable. Inexpensive.
Cons: None.
Awards: Winner of Excellence in Flash Media Solution
Written by Kermit