Why in hellshish HELL my writing speed to SD is 16 KB/s!!!! Help... please

[Dan_Aykroyd]

Hi!

I got about a month ago a SD card (Kingston... may be fake :( ) of 4GB that, testing with SKTools (installed it for this end; as manually copying files from within the device was painfully slow) reported a 16 KB/s write and 1.5 MB read.

Using a card reader the writing speed is as expected for the card.

What the hell is wrong? What can I do to troubleshoot or fix this?

Thanks.

[Enragin_Angel]

Transferring through activesync is slow. Softick's Card Export is slightly faster, but still slow. There's nothing you can do about it so keep using that card reader to transfer the large files.

[Mokubai]

The Axim seems to be very sensitive to the filesystem settings on storage cards. I got a 4GB card that was formatted FAT32 with 4KB Clusters and it was slow as heck. I managed to get a tool to format it on the pocket pc (winxp wanted to use the same format) and change it to FAT32 with 16KB clusters and the speed of the card was one heck of a lot better.

Storage Tools (http://www.softwinter.com/storagetools.html) can format the card for you, you only need the trial version as you don't need to use it that often....

Or Pocket Mechanic or something similar...

Remember to copy your data off before you format, you will loose everything in formatting the card.

[Dan_Aykroyd]

Yes... I always wondered it would be something related to cluster sizes, format, etc. But as I didn't have the exact info I haven't tested it yet. If I go higher than 16Kb p cluster, will it be even faster?

@Angel... two things... although activesync is quite slow, copying to internal memory is way faster than copying to my actual card. And 16KB per second is ridiculous... its not THAT slow

[Mokubai]

Going larger than 16Kb clusters may make it even faster, the only way to find out is to benchmark it, but then if you have a lot of small files you have to watch out for wastage as every file will take at least one cluster. You could in theory have 32 x 1Kb (32Kb total size) files that are taking up 32 x 32Kb clusters (1Mb used).

It's all about trading off speed vs waste, how you use the card and what you are willing to accept in penalties.

As I said before 16Kb clusters worked to dramatically improve my card, 32Kb may have improved it more but 16 made my card a lot more usable and I didn't want more wastage than I had to so I didn't bother to test further.

[Dan_Aykroyd]

Did you benchmarked when you were on 4KB and then, when you switched to 16KB? How did it ranked? How much "better" is 16 to 4 KB clusters?

[Mokubai]

I did some vague testing, but not anthing definite, according to Pocket Hack Master I think it said that my card was capable of 200Kb/s at 4kb clusters and something like 1Mb/s at 16Kb clusters.

The main reason I looked into changing the format was due to horrendous file deletion times of about 1-2 seconds with 4Kb clusters which was severely reduced by 16Kb clusters, I can only guess at it being a feature of the controller on the card... Possibly something in conjunction with the axim meant it prefered the larger block size. I tried a couple of times at 4Kb and 16Kb and it was consistently faster using 16Kb clusters.