16gb Memory card

[plexiora]

Hi

is it me or is there a substantial increase in the battery drain when using a memory card of this size?

[downloadtest82]

It's not you.

To quote my favorite answer from the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
"This behaviour is by design." :)

Background: new SDHC cards offer a lot more storage space than ordinary SD cards. This logical space has to come from somewhere, it's realized by putting (a lot) more flash memory cells, controller logic and addressing logic onto the card.

At the bottom line that means
more storage space = more transistors to power = higher energy consumption.

The universal still uses the same power as before (except maybe for a slightly higher CPU load on access because the addressing algorithm of SDHC is a bit more complex). But the card itself draws up to 4 times the power of ordinary SD cards.

All this is just true when the card is actively in use however (during read & write cycles). You can improve the overall power consumption by increasing chunk size and r/w buffers if you want.

Be warned though, if you don't know what you are doing you can majorly mess up system performance by toying with those!
Also it won't boost your battery life from 2 hours to 2 weeks, since many components on the universal use just as much or even significantly more power than the SDHC (backlight, UMTS-chipset, WiFi...).

You might also want to try out different SDHC cards. As always you get what you pay for. Cheap cards often use low-standard components with low manufacturing precision grade. This massively influences power efficiency too.

The power consumption of the cards is usually not mentioned in stores or on the box. Often you can however request a data sheet on the card directly from the manufacturer. It's usually in there somewhere.