SD card speeds

I have been checking the read and write speeds on some SD & SDHC cards this afternoon with some interesting results.

I measured them on both a laptop and hi spec desk top both with USB2 ports which should be capable of 480Mb/sec. The desk top gave better results - possible because of disk read/write speeds.

Total file size 1141 MB
Seconds MB/s
2GB Ultra
Write L 190 6
Write D 170 6.7
Read L 145 7.9
Read D 116 9.8
4GB Extreme III
Write L 95 12
Write D 87 13.1
Read L 89 12.8
Read D 68 16.8
4GB Extreme III 30MB/s
Write L 101 11.3
Write D 82 13.9
Read L 96 11.9
Read D 70 16.3

Obviously there is a bottleneck somewhere but interestingly the standard Extreme III was faster in some tests than the 30MB/s version.

I have actually achieved speeds in excess of 400Mb/s (50MB/s) on the desktop and nearer 320Mb/s (40MB/s) on the desktop - is it the cards that are limiting it, or maybe the SanDisk SD to USB2 Micromate adapter?



grrrrrrr. Why does formatting not work properly? It was fine when I created the post, but it now looks awful!

Well, for a start can you put a space after 'OSL' in your profile location, because at the moment the rest of it runs right across your post, obscuring your message. It has been mentioned before, but I guess you missed it.

Dan

I don't have a problem with Andrew's profile location, it sits nicely in it's allotted space and takes up 3 lines. Maybe with other browsers (I use Firefox) it is a problem.
I am not techie enough to comment further on his post though

Daniel,

I have changed it in the past. The problem is with IE - it does not conform to the browser standards and put breaks or line feeds where necessary.

In Firefox and other browsers I see:

Location: LHR/ABZ
/INV/OSL/ZRH/LAX
/SNA/SEA/YUL +++

There are spaces after ABZ and LAX which should force a line feed but IE is not interpreting it correctly. I have also put a space after OSL but you may find it does not do anything.

Indeed I do.

Sorry to have mentioned it again then when it's an IE problem.

Dan

Well, for some reason IE (I have just loaded it on this PC to see why ...) has a problem with / ...

So, I have removed a couple of them and hopefully it should resolve it for IE users.

Have you thought about getting Firefox 3 installed?

Best thing I have ever done, using Firefox 3..

Looks fine now.

I have Firefox and Opera installed, but for whatever reason always use IE7. Just what I'm used to I guess, and I quite like the way it works.

Dan

Really? You ought to get out more!

Dan

You may need a faster reader such as the Sandisk Extreme 30MB/s version or the Transcend P6.

The speed also varies depending on the size of the files, but I would have thought that you would have got faster than you got with both Extreme cards.

It's becoming quite complex now with all the different cards but the best test site is still http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/

One of the card readers that he rates quite highly is the Singim SG365S SD/MMC I actually bought two of them for 99p each from Aria (should have got six) Unfortunately no longer available.

20 MB cards tests using Singim SG365S SD/MMC link

30MB cards using the Transcend P6 (£9 off ebay) link

shim

Here's a test on tom's hardware link

They also had a problem that the cardreader wasn't fast enough with most class 6 cards

Quite interesting.... they find the Lexar Pro 133x to be the best which I have always used as my main cards, although I do use Toshiba as well because they are very well made in Japan.

Sadly whoever wrote the article has a lot of facts wrong starting with the first sentence "The Secure Digital (SD) card was invented by SanDisk in 2001 and was based on the multi-media card (MMC) standard."

It should have been (copied from another site):

The SD Memory Card was jointly developed by Toshiba, SanDisk and Matsushita, best known for its Panasonic brand name products.

shim

Hello,
I wrote the article at cardspeed and tried to buy a SG365S-R103, but without success. Or you willing to sell one of yours?
Regards
Sven