We've been playing quite a bit with new ROMs here for the past few days, and we've been noticing dramatic speed differences between different brands of SD-cards. For instance, we have a 'Dane-Elec' 128 MB card which writes at 25-30 kB/s and a 'Sandisk' which writes at 150 kB/s. 'Sandisk' is currently advertising it's 'Ultra' line of cards for high-end cameras, and the SD variety of these (at 512 MB) supposedly gets up up 2.5 MB/s. These are almost factor 100 differences !
We're suprised how little consumer-education is happening on the net regarding this issue. But we already have both day-jobs and time-consuming hobbies... So could one of you please make a nice automated flash-card speed comparison site which allow people to post results from a standardized tool? If you do it well, you could probably make a living off links to sites that sell the cards, and you'd be providing a damn useful service.
Even the "SanDisk" is the slow one....
There are some testing result about the SD Card, it seems that "Panasonc/Toshiba/HAGIWARA" work at almost twice fast as "SanDisk" can...
Please refer to the page http://www.digital.idv.tw/Cardtest/SD/SD-P1.htm
Hello
as far as i know simpletech one of the best if it's not the best, and pretty fast on reading and writing 10 MB/sec.
please check their technical details on this site
http://www.simpletech.com/upgrade_n...ber=STI-SD/256&std=1&showFrame=&ProfileID=330
thanks with best regards.
Othman
I bought a PNY 256Mb SD card. Found the reviews of it positive, and its speed was good. Price of 68 pounds inc VAT at savastore.com was a bargain.
review at:
http://www.envynews.com/review.php?ID=196
Because of the variation in SD card performance, it would be useful to consolidate information regarding Sd card performance somewhere. SPB have a benchmarking product that's free to use for personal users, so if anybody wants to post stats about their particular brand of SD card, this product may prove useful.
http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/benchmark/
I don't know if it translates to SD cards, but I found Lexar CF cards were several times faster than many others, and about 10x faster than a crap Mr. Flash card. Also, the power consumption was MUCH lower!
Also, the technology in 256MB and up card sizes is such that they are intrinsically around 4 times faster than a 128 or below. Now, the fastest 128 might be better than the slowest 256, but in general a 256 is going to be faster.
And forget MMC cards...SLOW!
It seems there is a big difference especially between cards by Panasonic and Sandisk.
The difference is so big you'd better watch out buying a card, there's only 3 manufacturer's and a lot of repacker's. If you don't inform yourself good, you might end up with a costy card that turns out to be a lousy SanDisk...
I found a thread about a test program and various results on Palm's.
check it out at:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12919
Is there such a program on the XDA that works really well?
maybe people could start a topic where all results can be posted?
The SPB benchmark tool says it will take 47 minutes to run and "may" destroy data. I'll have to leave it for another time then.
Ok, first run with the SPB tool on the Lexar 128MB card:
<sc-largefilewrite>13370.900000
<sc-largefileread>2272.100000
<sc-largefilecopyto>3129.100000
<sc-largefilecopyfrom>3096.500000
<sc-manyfileswrite>21207.100000
<sc-manyfilesread>1846.900000
<sc-manyfilescopyto>12893.000000
<sc-manyfilescopyfrom>13356.800000
<sc-dirlisting>139.100000
Related
Hi all,
I need your opinion. I'm planning to buy a Sandisk 512MB SD Card. How much does it compare with the 256SD Card with regards to speed? Is reading/writing much slower because of its bigger size? BTW my device is XDA. Thanks
My understanding of speed diffs
I don't think 256 vs 512 will make speed differences. The speed differences come between specific cards. My brief research yesterday suggested to me that SanDisk are kinda slow, even the Ultra II cards. It seems the fastest card, consistently, is the Panasonic. I have a plain 256MB sandisk card it PocketMechanic benchmarks it at 0.7x. I will test my new Panasonic card when it arrives later today (hopefully!).
Just for comparison, Lexar 32x cards are rated at 4.8MB/s, the Panasonic is supposedly rated at 10MB/s.
Another data point, I saw a discussion on Amazon.com reviews about the SanDisk 512 and somebody stating it was faster than the 256.
All this leads to: you really need to benchmark the specific cards you are interested in to see if they meet your speed needs. Speed is really variable, people talking about a single process that takes 45 minutes on one card and just like 1 minute on another card (brand).
Got the panasonic card
I got the panasonic card. It writes at "2.9x" as opposed to "0.7x" I got with the stock sandisk. That is better than 4 times the speed. Benchmarked using Pocket Mechanic on an XDA.
Hi,
Can anyone having micro SD 2GB ultra card can tell us about its performance? I have heard that 2Gb card as such had some impact on the performance of the phone and slows it a bit down? Is there any improvement using this faster card?
I have SanDisk 2GB MicroSD - in my opinion it's quicker than my previous 1GB.
I have seen sandisk 2gb ultra II micro sd card in the market. I just wanted to know if it improves the performance over the simple 2gb micro sd card?
i have a SanDisk 2GB standard MicroSD and performance is great, no slow downs on anything.
its a lot faster than a 1Gb card (can't remmeber make, probably SanDisk) that was with my Universal, that was sloooow...
sorry that that doesnt really answer your question, but in my opinion i think that there isn't much gain in opting for the Ultra MicroSD card, as there's not anything wrong with the standard one!
Comparing performance with different flash cards, be sure they are formatted with the same file system (FAT16/FAT32) and the same cluster size. Instead, your comparision results ae meaningless.
Lurker0 said:
Comparing performance with different flash cards, be sure they are formatted with the same file system (FAT16/FAT32) and the same cluster size. Instead, your comparision results ae meaningless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And what are the best in your opinion? (cluster size and 16/32)
sergiopi said:
And what are the best in your opinion? (cluster size and 16/32)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd suggest you to search for existing threads and articles.
There is no a one-for-all solutions. One thing that I'd recommend is to format with one FAT copy (again, do a search). Then, the bigger the cluster size, the better berformance, but, OTOH, the more space is wasted. With a statistics provided e.g. by SK Tools anybody may make their decision on how to balance. SK Tools also a good tol to format cards with.
As for FAT16 vs FAT32, this is the last thing to decide. If a chosen cluster size allows FAT16 for the card, better to use it. If it does not - you have no a choice but to use FAT32. The only drawback of FAT16 is a fixed root directory size, which is not a big isue with large (16K to 64K) cluster sizes required for FAT16 on big cards.
But the main point for this thread still is: comparing flash card speeds, use the same format parameters.
Had anyone done this kind of comparison on different micro sd cards?
It imaging that this level of testing is about pointless, the typical bottleneck here is likely to be the reader device, not the card.
The phone will likely be the slowest aspect, at least when compared to a desktop reader...
You might find a turtle that can sprint, but it will still be a turtle
I'm familiar with the difference between the class 4 (4MB/s transfer speed) and the class 6 (6MB/s transfer speed). But is there any value in using a class 6 card on the XV6800 (regardless of size)?
I ask because I have a 4GB class 6 A-Data microSDHC card in my XV6800 right now and there is no problem at all with it. However, I am considering purchasing an 8GB class 4 Sandisk microSDHC card. So it got me thinking, even thought the A-Data card is capable of a faster transfer speed, that doesn't mean the XV6800 is ever actually using that extra speed. So would I see any slowdown if I moved to a "slower" spec'd microsdhc card?
I looked around for transfer speeds on the XV6800's microSD card slot and didn't come across anything.
Anyway have any data on this? Thanks in advance.
Depends some on what you are using it for but I doubt you will notice much of a difference. When transferring using a card and a card reader from your computer you may notice a difference but otherwise the interface in the phone itself doesn't seem to be all that fast anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the comment, but that's why I'm asking if anyone has any actual data. The device either reads and writes to the microsd card slot above 4MB/s or it does not. I have not found a way to benchmark it so I'm looking for some actual detail. But thank you.
So I found an application that is supposed to measure the transfer speeds of the card slot on a Windows Mobile device. It's from Audacity Audio. The link on Softpedia is here.
I'm familiar with the application because I used the Palm OS version on my old Treo 700P. The problem is that he results always seem inconsistent and confusing.
In any event, I ran the test on two different microSD cards. The first is an empty 1GB Sandisk microSD card with. These cards don't have a "class" rating. The second is a 4GB AData Class 6 microSDHC card. I still had 2.5GB of the 4GB empty.
1GB
Wrt32bit/Wrt8KB/Read8KB
1105/330572/7943757
1105/335208/7710117
1123/366634/7710117
1030/311705/7489828
1070/306242/7489828
Avg
1086/330072/7668729
4GB
1462/109317/6393756
527/111408/6241523
1462/119482/4161015
517/85724/6241523
1581/126334/6241523
Avg
1109/110453/5855868
Honestly, the scores don't seem to make much sense. The read speeds all indicate north of 4MB/s and most of the time above 6MB/s. That's good. But the write speeds seem pointless. 330KB/s (.3MB/s) for the 1GB and 110KB/s (.1MB/s) for the 4GB ?!?!?! That doesn't seem right.
Anyway, any ideas would be welcome.
Write speeds are typically going to be a great deal slower for flash memory. And larger cards being even slower for writing makes a twisted sort of sense. All flash cards have "load-leveling" algorithms built into them to spread the writes across the flash disk in order to reuse locations as little as possible (flash memory cells have a limited lifetime). So the bigger the card, the more memory the load leveler has to manage. Of course, I could have it completely wrong....
So i recently rooted and ive pretty much just been putting roms on my sdcard and checking each one out... is my sd card going to be able to handle a lot of roms on it? or should i just keep one on at a time so its not as full.... also are there things on the sd card that i can just delete and dont really need?
I doubt that you'll have to worry about filling up your SD card with roms. Most roms range from 50mb to 100mb so you can fit at least 10 in 1 GB. Your card holds a little less than 8 GB due to other various things that you download that install data and folders to the SD card. Unless you go crazy with holding a lot of music or videos on you card, then you should be fine. I'd be more concerned with the internal phone storage, as that being filled up would possibly slow down the phone a bit. As far as what folders you need or not, just open them up and double check what is inside. It's usually easy to tell if the folder contains something that might be useful. If nothing else, the phone will automatically install the folder again if it's important to a function it thinks is needed. Hope this helps...
i have most Eris ROMs posted in these forums (22 different flavors ). including multiple versions of some... all stored on my sdcard
my entire ROM folder is 3.34GB. i do, however, have a 16gb SDcard...
If I bought a faster SD card for my phone would it see a performance increase? I hear there are multiple classes of SD card so if I buy a higher class (better) would I be able to see the difference?
Hungry Man said:
If I bought a faster SD card for my phone would it see a performance increase? I hear there are multiple classes of SD card so if I buy a higher class (better) would I be able to see the difference?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Upgrading to a Class 6 sdcard would give a noticeable improvement if you use a2sd. Other than that it would be minimal for file transfers...
here are the classes:
* Class 2: 16 Mbit/s (2 MB/s)
* Class 4: 32 Mbit/s (4 MB/s)
* Class 6: 48 Mbit/s (6 MB/s)
* Class 10: 80 Mbit/s (10 MB/s)
the cards aren't cheap... and for the money, i don't think the return is that great. i found a CHEAP deal on a class 4 card, but don't do anything but apps2sd. no "real" performance increase. a class 6 card is of course faster, but i honestly doubt you'll notice any "major" performance increase, regardless of configuration (i.e., swap on sd, apps on sd, etc). there are varying opinions on this topic, but that's my .02. i'd say the money would be better spent elsewhere... maybe even donating to a dev lol
however, moving files to/from sd to pc, etc, will be faster... may cut down on flashing ROMs by a few seconds
I see. Thanks for the info. Do you know what the Eris has? I think a Class 10 can be around 60 dollars lol I'd much rather donate to a dev.
Hungry Man said:
I see. Thanks for the info. Do you know what the Eris has? I think a Class 10 can be around 60 dollars lol I'd much rather donate to a dev.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
8GB Class 2
Oh I see. So they're pretty low.
Hey Guys
Am looking for a suitable Microsd Class rating ( am going for Sandisk, 16 GB or 8GB) for my Motorola Photon. I am going to install a lot of games, specially those Tegra 2 ones, Max Payne and others too, and alot of apps on the phone.And i might use Link2SD to move them to the SD card to keep Phone memory less occupied.
So as to what i feel is that i'd be requiring good read/write speeds for games, plus proper loading of apps (in time, i don't want lags at all). the problem is, according to the Price, i can go for 8GB class 6 or 16GB class 4. What do u guys think i should go for? would it really matter? i know class ratings are the Writing Speeds, but who knows?
Regards
Save up for a Class 10. There is a world of difference between a class 4 and a class 10 especially when using ROMs that have the SDSpeed tweaks.
I like class 4 personally as write speed really only affects installing imho. lower write cards tend to have higher read as well. SanDisk as a brand makes Damn fine cards which I think brand makes more difference than class overall.
Sent from my mopho
@Loki,
What about a Sandisk 8 or 16GB Ultra at UHS 1 speed?
i read the following on Wikipedia about UHS Cards
"Cards that comply with UHS show UHS-I or UHS-II on the label, and report this capability to the host device. Use of UHS requires that the host device command the card to drop from 3.3-volt to 1.8-volt operation and select the 4-bit transfer mode".
Is above compliant with Motorola Photon? I cant seem to find a Sandisk card with a Class 10 rating else than this one.
@Cornelius,
i think that when playing a game, the Phone might want to Read/Write data during play times even.Reading happens all the time, but Writing would also take place. But as Loki said, i'd be interested in trying these ROMs with SDSpeed tweaks. i really want no lags at all...
Regards
it really depends on the game, but writes happen way less than reads in most cases. class 10 is more for pictures and videos in my humble opinion. most games were it matters, it's a 400+ mb 1 Time download and then massive reads.
Sent from my mopho
@Cornelius
What about apps? they would also be fine with Class 4? i use a Sandisk 16GB class 4 in my Sansa Fuze all the time, and never had a problem with it, but i dont want my phone to lag at all. Apps might need to Read and Write in real time right??
Regards
if finances are an issue, than here is a G Skill brand 32gb class 6 for $15 shipped.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16820231603
usually in 99.99% of cases read is more important than write. usually writes are so small they don't matter.
Sent from my mopho
Lexar 32GB Class 10 $26
I'm averaging 11MB Write and 21MB Read on Imperium Initiatve
high write or high read its always a compromise. if your that worried about hints of lag use the smallest sdcard you can get by with.
Sent from my mopho
@Lokifish Marz
One suggestion was Class 10 microSD, and when paired up with ROMs that have SDSpeed tweaks, where does the difference lie (imagining u have experiences with class 10 and SDSpeed tweaks)? What is better than when a class 4 is used?
Plus what tool do u use to get the Read/Write speeds? i suppose its on ur phone only? Also i am thinking of pulling the trigger on an 8GB Class 10 Sandisk. I live in India and Amazon is not an option.....only ebay.in is....
@Cornelius, i agree with what u say about reading going on way more than writing, but then what about SSDs in computers? the performance boost is just because of the Increase in read speeds and not write? I know it gets pretty complex in computers, swap and pagefiles, etc, but faster HDDs mean faster computers, and even though writing happens lesser than reading on the phones, but some writing must be happening that bottlenecks the speed of the phone. am i Right? just trying to learn here from u guys.
Regards
no I'm saying a class 4 usually has a higher read speed than a class 10 but yes the big boost from ssd hdd is the read in 99% of cases.
Sent from my mopho
psgarcha92 said:
@Lokifish Marz
One suggestion was Class 10 microSD, and when paired up with ROMs that have SDSpeed tweaks, where does the difference lie (imagining u have experiences with class 10 and SDSpeed tweaks)? What is better than when a class 4 is used?
Plus what tool do u use to get the Read/Write speeds? i suppose its on ur phone only? Also i am thinking of pulling the trigger on an 8GB Class 10 Sandisk. I live in India and Amazon is not an option.....only ebay.in is....
@Cornelius, i agree with what u say about reading going on way more than writing, but then what about SSDs in computers? the performance boost is just because of the Increase in read speeds and not write? I know it gets pretty complex in computers, swap and pagefiles, etc, but faster HDDs mean faster computers, and even though writing happens lesser than reading on the phones, but some writing must be happening that bottlenecks the speed of the phone. am i Right? just trying to learn here from u guys.
Regards
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am not sure what class 4 Cornelius is using. I don't have one but do have a class 6 Lexar from the same family as my class 10. On Imperium, the class 6 was slower than the class 10 in every aspect:
Lexar 8GB
class 6
Write- 5.8MB/s
Read- 18.8MB/s
The SDpeed tweaks, when set up correctly, improve read speeds across the board. It does tend to max out at a read speed of 20-25MB/s on Imperium. Further tuning may improve this but haven't had the time. I haven't tried any of the UHS cards yet. The big drawback with lower class cards is going to be your write speeds, the falloff on write speeds is there but not as much.
I'm not saying that Cornelius is wrong, just in my personal experience with flash storage has been different. Having used flash storage as everything from regular use to building flash storage based workstations, the lower class rating has a noticeable impact on write speeds but not so noticeable impact on read speeds on a tuned setup.
I only use SanDisk cards, used to go Kingston but they kinda fell out a while back.
Sent from my mopho
I'm using the newer Samsung cards and they make quality memory as well. As cheap as a class 10 card can be had why not go for that over a lower class card?