Speed of Panasonic 256MB SD

thax1 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 28

I'm absolutely over the moon about the speed of my new SD card.

The time for the Lands End - John OGroats test has fallen significantly.

My old Sandisk 128mb took around 30 minutes to complete this, and routes around london were painful too.

The new Panasonic 256Mb did it in around 60 seconds! On a Ipaq 1940!

The packaging says "10Mb/sec" and "Super High Speed" but I didnt think the impact would be so pronounced.

Very chuffed :D

PS. Argos do them for 85 quid.

peliasson7 · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2004 1:41 pm Post subject:

Hi!

Anyone know a way to test the speed of the cards?

For example, I have one card someone else has another card and a third person has a third card but all our PPC:s are of different models and brands.

Is there any way to test this and get reliable results for the speed of the card?

If that was possible then we could start a thread with test results. Then everybody could check this and then know which card is currently the best. Thumbs Up

Regards

Peter

thax1 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 28

I'm wondering if the Lands End to John o Groats test would actually be mostly about SD speed.

The small ipaq 1940 has a relatively slow 266mhz processor, and yet my times for the route seem so affected by card speed.

Perhaps the processing time is irrelevant compared with the bottleneck of accessing the maps?

If so, this means the previous 5 page thread of calculation times shows card performance- even more than it shows processor performance.

Deleth · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject:

I wasn't sure if the speed difference was that signifcant between cards until I tried my new 256 Simpletech card today which is way quicker than the 256 sandisk card that I was previously using

vicky · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 9:22 pm Post subject:

Not sure how much Card speed affects the calculation

Using a Medion Pocket PC (The one from the Aldi Offer), which is a 400mhz PPC2003 machine,

Memory Card 356mb Medion MMC, slow bog standard card

TomTom 2 (Ver 2.24) Lands end to John O'Groats @ 42 seconds to calculate, (TomTom Standard Settings).

So from that it does not look like a slow card makes so much difference

Regards

Victoria

thax1 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 28

It's probably not a slow SD card.

It seems several manufacturers make faster 256MB and higher cards.

Panasonic for one - their 64 and 128 cards are 2MB/sec rather than 10MB/sec for the 256 and 512.

Also many 'no-name' cards are rebadged units - I don't think there are many fabrication plants in the world.

I dont know about MMC cards though - some people on other forums are citing them as faster than SD.

iancjc · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 9:51 pm Post subject:

re the spoeed of the sd cards.

I'm 90% sure that the ipaq can't read at anything like 10mb/sec (more like 2x) so the card speed won't speed things up by a factor of 30x or even 10x).

I've just tried this on a 3850 (206mhz) and a 2 year old 128mb sd card (so definately not a fast card) and I got the route in a tad over 5 minutes so the 30 minute time is very odd.

Is it possible that the orignal card required reformating or defragging - although scandisk cards - when they work - are generally accepted to be quite poor in speed terms).

My bet it that just about any different card would have given you a big improvement with the extra speed of the panasonic acrd the icing on the cake.

I use a panasonic card (only £60 on ebay) in my digi camera and the write speed is really noticably better than the bog standard card I used, so the gain is their but not by the factor your result indicates.

As an aside - has anyone ever driven from le to jOg's?

cheers

Ian

longwori · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2004 10:58 pm Post subject:

Thax1, do you mind telling me where you bought this high speed Panasonic card from - it sounds pretty tempting. The speed of my Fuji 256MB card is pretty poor.

Ian.
_________________
TomTom Go 520, HTC Wildfire with CoPilot Live Premium UK & CoPilot Live Standard USA

Steve_o · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 19, 2004 Posts: 15

Hi...

I have the exact same Panasonic card after not having much luck with data retrieval form the 256 Scan Disc make. I use Tom Tom2 with just the UK maps installed. I think the fast data retrieval on the SD card makes up for the slowish 266 processor.

Just my tuppence.

Steve_o

thax1 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 28

Ian.

£85 from Argos on the highstreet - not exactly the most rewarding shopping experience (apologies to any argos staff if you're reading this) - but at least it's over fairly quickly!

Incidentally the Panasonic shop down the road didnt stock anything bigger than a 128 (and they are the slower ones).

Iancjc,

Agree entirely - I think many of the Sandisk cards from China have serious problems. Whilst I didnt see any obvious data corruption (unlike other users) the speed was very slow.

I doubt fragmentation - I copied the maps onto the card from new, and never added other data. Could have been though, possibly through errors creeping in. Maybe theres some basic error checking or re-reading going on.

It used to also manifest itself in slow searching for names of towns / roads. Type in more than 3 letters and it would pause for ~60 secs. Thats gone too.

I wonder how many other user problems and TomTom quirks are Sandisk related as they seem to have majority of the SD market .

Scoof · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 21, 2004 Posts: 20

Hi All,

I am being forced to stand up for Sandisk after what I am reading. I don't know much about the standard SandiskSD but I heard that it is slow. However, the Sandisk ULTRAII SD is a slightly different beast. I have only had mine for a couple of weeks and I have had no problems whatsoever with it.

The card was made in China, is 256MB and was shipped from US, all for about £48. That beats Argos! Admittedly I am using an H4150 which has a 400MHz processor.

L.End to JOGroats was calculated in about 23secs!

My main gripe at the moment is the routes which TT calculates Evil or Very Mad

having compared with my desktop Autoroute which seems to give pucker routes!

Scoof. Thumbs Up

RichDem · Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 4:49 pm Post subject:

Interesting,

I have just brought the panasomic SD card from Argos and did the same test (Lands end to John O'Groats) it took 3:27 on my 3950 with PPC2003.

My old 128 mb integral card did the same route in 4:48 so the new card is faster but no where near the 60 seconds Question

Richard
_________________
If it ain't broke then fiddle with it until it is!

jasb · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 3:22 pm Post subject: WoW

Is that faster than my 40x cf card...apparently 1x equals 150kb/s
so 40x150kb/s

If 10mb/s is faster then i want one of those! :D

Jasb

(i shouldnt mess....but i like it)

DinAlt · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 4:44 pm Post subject:

Jasb,

140xs = 6MB/s - but if you actually benchmark them you won't get anywhere near this (I have two 512 IPro 40xs and they bench mark nearer 4MB/s). BTW if people are after a bargain get the Kingston branded CF cards from valueflash - they benchmark at almost 20 times for less than £30 inc vat and delivery.

DinAlt

Steve_o · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 19, 2004 Posts: 15

I got 54 secs for Lands End to Jon O Groats.

On an Ipaq 1940 with Panasonic 256 SD card.

Impressive.

Steve_o

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