Testing The Card

I tested the card using my Sony CLIE NX80V PDA and compared it against two other Memory Sticks. Here are the details :-

The memory card capacities were derived using Filez.

Each memory card was tested six times and the average was used in the performance comparisons.

Storage Capacity

Memory Stick PRO cards come with MagicGate support for copyright protection. This is a pretty much useless feature. But worse of all, it uses up a large portion of the Memory Stick's storage capacity.

Because it does not support MagicGate, the 128MB Sony Memory Stick only lost a paltry 4.4MB to formatting. But look at what happens when we move to the Memory Stick PRO and PRO Duo cards. The 256MB Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo lost 29.1MB to formatting and MagicGate. That's a significant amount of capacity lost to MagicGate.

Surprisingly, the 256MB SanDisk Memory Stick PRO lost less space than the Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo card with the same nominal capacity! Instead of losing 29.1MB, the 256MB SanDisk Memory Stick PRO card only lost 18.6MB. That's a saving of about 10.5MB!