how important is speed of an SD card?

[jf116]

do "fast" SD cards read faster than normal SD cards, or do they mostly only write faster?

i will use my axim x30 for gps navigation. the nav programs have to continually read new map sections as the user moves, so i am guessing that a fast reading card would be better.

the ability to write to the card fast would be useful for loading maps, but i guess isn't critical for operation. on the other hand, i have read that some cards write so slowly that it is a major hassle.

basically, i can't see any downside to a fast card, unless they aren't as compatible.

any suggestions?

[x_789]

Well I can say I did some testing yesterday on a program. I had something running from an Old Sanddisk CF card it takes about 6 seconds for it to pull certain info from the card and load it in the program I was running. So I copied the the db files to my BIS same thing 6 seconds moved it to my programs dir so it would be in Rom Same thing 6 seconds. So what that told me is that the Speed of the Card is not always the biggest factor.

I know people claim that Beta Player runs much better from an SD Card than a CF card I have not been able to duplicate this as I only have CF cards. I honestly do not think that the speed maters on the device though because it seems to be that the bottle neck is the axim when it comes to pulling data from cards. You will see the diffrence in card speeds surley though when you are moving data via a card reader a usb 2.1 card reader with a 60x card will fly compared to a usb 1.1 and an old card. hope that gives you some insight.. X