I'll write it once more here just for the record, people seem always to forget to align the partition when using cf cards partitioned in older OS's.
In case this applies for you too, it would be interesting to show new measurements with the partition aligned. I bet it'll be a pleasant surprise 😉

konc wrote:

it would be interesting to show new measurements with the partition aligned.

How does one "align" a partition?

BTW, I've seen reviews where that particular model of Kingston CF is super slow (5-10MB/s), and all other cards are way faster. Not sure why here it's the opposite. I have that same adapter and a Transcend 133X card. Will try to get some measurements when I get the time.

Partitions created with modern OS's (anything later than XP) should be aligned. The easiest way to check if a partition is aligned without using any special software is in my opinion "msinfo32". Run it, navigate to components -> storage -> disks and check the "partition starting offset". If dividing this number with 4096 gives an integer, the partition is aligned. If not, I strongly urge you to do so on SSD's and CF cards to see the difference. For less trouble one can also download AS SSD which shows it directly on its first screen (Green OK, red BAD)

There are many ways to do this, the idea is to give a correct starting offset to the partition. A simple way would be to connect the CF to a modern OS and create the partition there. My favorite method is to just boot the computer with a GParted cd and create the partition by leaving 1MB space preceding it. If you' re comfortable with it you can also use the command line diskpart.exe, there is an "align=xxx" parameter you can specify in the create partition command.

btw, the default starting point of a partition that older OS's had by default is not a new concept/problem, it just became known to more people with the beginning of SSD's when XP was still the dominant OS. For example Microsoft has an article on its knowledge base since 2009 on how to align the partitions of a RAID to achieve expected performance. OK, it refers to aligning the partition of a RAID with the RAID's stripe unit, but the concept is exactly the same (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929491/en-us)

This is a nice little page I found by a quick search in case you want to get some basic understanding of this:
http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Partition_Alignment/en

EaseUS partition master can do the job. You need to check box "optimize for SSD" before doing any partition change. You can also align USB pendrive, SDcard...etc...
Starting offset changes from 32256 to 32768.

Pretty much as covered by konc and DataPro, but the sector size should also be set to a multiple of 4kb. Anything lower than 4kb will remove most, if not all, of the benefits of using an aligned partition.

Excellent note Maeslin