Beware: SD-card speeds...

[Peter Poelman]

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.

[Anonymous]

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

[othman]

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_navigator/index.php?partNumber=STI-SD/256&std=1&showFrame=&ProfileID=330

thanks with best regards.


Othman :)

[Anonymous]

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

[andyclap]

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/

[Carlos]

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!

[Lx]

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?

[Carlos]

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.

[Carlos]

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