I have three brands of SmartMedia cards: SimpleTech, Viking, and the Olympus card that came with my camera. I timed how long it took to copy the same 5MB file to each card. The result: the other cards took 32 seconds and the SimpleTech took 38 seconds. So, my results show that the SimpleTech is about 18% slower than the others. That's important to me because when I take action shots I'm often waiting for the previous image to write to disk before I can take the next shot.