Testing Memory Card Speed

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.steelbytes.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.steelbytes.com/</a><br /><br /></div>I'm doing some speed tests on a few different brands of 512 MB Secure Digital cards, and I needed to come up with a good way of testing them. I discovered a tool last year called HD_Speed, and it does exactly what you think: it allows you to test both reading and writing speeds of any drive attached to the system: hard drives, optical drives, and flash memory cards. The developer was even kind enough to alter the program for me to add a new feature that would make my testing even easier. If you're a stats junkie, download this app - and, even better, it's free! Look under the "Disk Utils" section to grab it.

[ctmagnus]

:way to go:

The little testing I've done has my Lexar 256MB card twice as fast as the Sandisk with Pocket Backup and three times as fast copying data from the PC to it, in a reader.

[Jason Dunn]

The little testing I've done has my Lexar 256MB card twice as fast as the Sandisk with Pocket Backup and three times as fast copying data from the PC to it, in a reader.

Yeah, the results of memory card speed tests are quite amazing when you get into it...I hope to have some equally interesting results. ;-)

[ctmagnus]

fwiw, here are my results (http://www.magnusson.ca/Filez/HD_Speed%20Log.txt). The Lexar card is the first bunch and the Sandisk card is the last bunch.

Interestingly enough, the numbers are very similar even though in practice the speeds are drastically different.

[hotweiss]

The little testing I've done has my Lexar 256MB card twice as fast as the Sandisk with Pocket Backup and three times as fast copying data from the PC to it, in a reader.

The reason for this is that Lexar uses two suppliers for their cards: Sandisk and Panasonic. The Lexar card you have is made by Panasonic, that is why it is twice as fast as the Sandisk card. Panasonic makes the fastest SD cards and Sandisk makes the slowest.

[Birdman]

Very interesting! I will have to try this out.
Just to give a real world example, I have been using a Viking 256MB SD card in my XDA. Always worked fine and I am able to load pix and music on and off the card using my card reader.
I recently bought a Pentax digital camera (the S4) and I bought a 256 SD card with the camera. I bought it at Black's (in Toronto) and they told me the SD card, even though branded under their name, is effectively, a Sandisk card. After taking some pictures and trying to load the pictures (each one is about 2MB) onto my computer using the reader, the speed was driving me crazy. It would take as much as 40 - 50 seconds just to drag one .jpg file from the card onto the computer.
I tried a test by putting my Viking card into the camera, taking the same picture, and loading it on to my computer. The .jpg file moved in a fraction of the time. Clearly, the Black's branded Sandisk SD card had terrible speeds.
I then tried a similar test in my XDA, i.e. how long to load a large MS Reader file off of each card. Surprisingly, I did not notice any difference between the 2 cards. So I now use the Viking card in my camera and the Black's branded Sandisk card in my XDA. Seems to work fine.

[hotweiss]

Stay away from Toshiba and Sandisk cards, unless you choose their High-Speed line. Panasonic is the best manufacturer of SD cards, they are on average 3-4 times faster then Toshiba and Sandisk.

[jonathanchoo]

Testing from a PalmOS's perspective, all Sandisk and Toshiba branded/made cards are slow, Sandisk being the slowest. I own a 10Mb/s Panasonic 256 card and overal its seven times faster than my PNY 256 (Sandisk) card. Older Sandisk cards (I think before August) are notorious for their ease of failure (you can check the serial number to obtain the batch date) as well as some Toshiba's. Curiously my Toshiba 128 is dead slow on my Toshiba e310 PPC and every two months data will be corrupted. Assessing the Games folder

Note however that Panasonic has a 'slow' version of SD cards as well with 2Mb/s rated speed (the same as generic Sandisk and Lexar cards). The Hi-Speed (10Mb/s) are around 30% more expensive than the 2Mb/s cards. Just because its Panasonic does not mean its fast - you need to make sure you get the Hi-Speed version. All 256/512 are Hi-Speed.

Sandisk's fastest card (Ultra II) is rated at 9Mb/s.

[fishd]

You also need to try to find out what type of SD card it is... IIRC there is a type called MLC which uses what amounts to "ram-doubler" technology to store more than one bit in each location... these cards are the slowest!

I had one (branded Expansys) in my T3 and copying a 20mb file via hotsync took over 30 mins... I replaced it with a Panasonic card that now takes around a minute for the same file...

There is an app for the Palm (VFSMark) that looks at the card details and shows the manufacturer, my Expansys card is a Toshiba whereas my pals Expansys card is a Sandisk... my pals card is about twice as fast as mine! Not sure if the PPC app does the same...

[hotweiss]

Here's a good discussion about SD benchmarks:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/forum/topic.asp?whichpage=1&ARCHIVEVIEW=&TOPIC_ID=12919
Although these benchmarks were done on Palm's, this should still be an accurate indicator for PPC devices.