I know that this SD card is aimed at camcorders and DSLRs but it would really help if you reviewed some high performance microSD cards for smartphones. Booting Android and apps off a slow microSD card is no fun at all.
I second that suggestion, would love to know what card to buy as a replacement of my quickly overflowing 4GB-Card.
Though testing µSD-Cards can be tricky. When I tried to compare a few cards I already owned for my own phone, I started to use ATTO disk benchmark with a µSD on USB connector. To my big surprise every card seemed to show exactly the same performance. I figured maybe the USB-Port was restricting the performance, so I also tested some cards with an µSD-SD converter in my Notebook.
To my surprise, the cards now showed differences, but they all were slower than on the USB-Port of my Desktop. After realising this, I switched of the ASrock XFast USB software, and that was indeed the difference, afterwards the cards were all much slower, differing from card to card, on exactly the same USB port.
I tried a few benchmarks on my Android itself, but none of them seemed to deliver reproducible results.
The problem is no one makes phone optimized sd cards they focus on high sequential read/write speeds at the expense of high random read/write speed which are great for camera but useless for phones which need more random then sequential which is why people should using nothing faster then class 4 in a phone
The problem is that the class rating only refers to the max sequential r/w speed and does not touch on random small file I/Os as you suggest. I remember reading a forum post on XDA developers (can't find the topic now) where it was discussed which cards were better and I think that one of the recommended ones was a SanDisk class 6 one. Much quicker than some class 10 cards in real world because of the good random r/w performance.
So there are very fast microSD cards out there for mobile phones but it is very hard finding out which ones exactly.
Arent they two completely different interfaces? SDHC is a lot faster than microSD. There isnt much you can do for microSD because it is single channel serial; ie there is only one data line. SDHC has 4 data lines. It would be about 4 times as fast at any given speed.
And if the 30 MB/s reported for this one are as believable as the 90 MB/s for the full size card in this reporting, it is only 3 times slower. And random access speeds may just be exactly the same, if the data blocks are small enough.
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semo - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
I know that this SD card is aimed at camcorders and DSLRs but it would really help if you reviewed some high performance microSD cards for smartphones. Booting Android and apps off a slow microSD card is no fun at all.ShieTar - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
I second that suggestion, would love to know what card to buy as a replacement of my quickly overflowing 4GB-Card.Though testing µSD-Cards can be tricky. When I tried to compare a few cards I already owned for my own phone, I started to use ATTO disk benchmark with a µSD on USB connector. To my big surprise every card seemed to show exactly the same performance. I figured maybe the USB-Port was restricting the performance, so I also tested some cards with an µSD-SD converter in my Notebook.
To my surprise, the cards now showed differences, but they all were slower than on the USB-Port of my Desktop. After realising this, I switched of the ASrock XFast USB software, and that was indeed the difference, afterwards the cards were all much slower, differing from card to card, on exactly the same USB port.
I tried a few benchmarks on my Android itself, but none of them seemed to deliver reproducible results.
SunLord - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
The problem is no one makes phone optimized sd cards they focus on high sequential read/write speeds at the expense of high random read/write speed which are great for camera but useless for phones which need more random then sequential which is why people should using nothing faster then class 4 in a phonesemo - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
The problem is that the class rating only refers to the max sequential r/w speed and does not touch on random small file I/Os as you suggest. I remember reading a forum post on XDA developers (can't find the topic now) where it was discussed which cards were better and I think that one of the recommended ones was a SanDisk class 6 one. Much quicker than some class 10 cards in real world because of the good random r/w performance.So there are very fast microSD cards out there for mobile phones but it is very hard finding out which ones exactly.
Shadowmaster625 - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
Arent they two completely different interfaces? SDHC is a lot faster than microSD. There isnt much you can do for microSD because it is single channel serial; ie there is only one data line. SDHC has 4 data lines. It would be about 4 times as fast at any given speed.ShieTar - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
That does not seem to stop Sandisk from also selling a µSDXC UHS card:http://sandisk.de/products/mobile-memory-products/...
And if the 30 MB/s reported for this one are as believable as the 90 MB/s for the full size card in this reporting, it is only 3 times slower. And random access speeds may just be exactly the same, if the data blocks are small enough.