The speeds I listed were write speeds in my Nikon D200.  That's the
speed that really *matters* to me.

For read speeds...hmm, I only have figures from the 80x card.  That
tested at 9.1MB/sec read (SanDisk USB 2 reader on an XP box).  There
appears to be huge variation in readers and in motherboard USB
support, so that figure only means much on my system.

Yes.

In fact, I proved it (to myself) just this afternoon when I did a shoot of a
sandlot baseball practice.  I turned on the burst mode, got some really great
sequences and never missed the next shot.  I could barely get the camera away
from my eye before the buffer cleared and the read/write LED went out.

I'm using a 20D with a Sandisk Ultra II 1gb - apparently NOT the newest model
of their "faster" CF card.

I paid just over $65 for another (identical) card the other day.

Bingo.  That's the key.  The rest depends on the photographer.
An amateur can download to his computer while eating dinner.
Read speed hardly matters in that case.  It will matter in
others.

  ---- Paul J. Gans

I'm not claiming that's all that anybody could reasonably care about;
certainly not.  I'm claiming those are the numbers I bothered to
measure carefully and had to hand :-).