Difference in SD cards / loading times

[PascalP]

As there is some confusion on different SD cards and different matters of formatting, I did a small test with 3 cards I have available at the moment.

All cards I tested are formatted as FAT32 with the standard cluster size using the standard Windows formatting tool and using a USB 2.0 to MicroSD adapter.
I performed 5 tests with each card:
- Read speed
- Write speed
- Boot time of 3 different games on the multikit (timed from the moment I pressed the button to load until the auto-reboot started)
- Hyper Street Fighter (U)
- Alien vs Predator (U)
- Gigawing (U)

Here are my results:

	Write	Read	HSFII	AvP	GigaWing
Sandisk Ultra 8GB	8.2 MB/s	55 MB/s	53 sec	27 sec	34 sec
Kingston 8GB	4 MB/s	15 MB/s	55 sec	34 sec	37 sec
Transcend 2GB	3.3 MB/s	8 MB/s	57 sec	35 sec	39 sec

As you can see there is no big difference in load times of games, especially when you compare the read speeds of the individual cards.

If anyone can re-do the same test with different cards, I think we can make a nice overview of which cards work best

 

[aha2940]

I do not think the card makes a big difference because its speed is not the bottleneck in the time the games spend to load. AFAIK, the bottleneck is the writing speed of the flash RAM where the games are written to be played. Any decent SD card should be faster than that.

 

[PascalP]

Yes I agree, the 'bottleneck' appears to be the CPS2 kit itself.
But as you can see in my results there is a small difference between a 'premium' Sandisk card and a 'standard' Kingston card.

If you could load the same games and time the load time I think it should be pretty comparable with my results.
My (bad) results for the read/write speed under Windows could also be caused by my crappy USB2.0 to MicroSD adapter...

 

[rtw]

My (bad) results for the read/write speed under Windows could also be caused by my crappy USB2.0 to MicroSD adapter...

Which software did you use to test the read speed ?

USB adapters are locked at USB transfer speed, when I was testing them I used a PCMCIA (PC-Card) adapter in my laptop which connected directly to the PCI bus.

 

[PascalP]

My (bad) results for the read/write speed under Windows could also be caused by my crappy USB2.0 to MicroSD adapter...

Which software did you use to test the read speed ?
USB adapters are locked at USB transfer speed, when I was testing them I used a PCMCIA (PC-Card) adapter in my laptop which connected directly to the PCI bus.

This was the speed as it was visible with the standard Windows copy/paste/transfer screen.
As mentioned, it was a standard USB2.0 to MicroSD adapter (connected to a USB 3.0 port, so this will not be the bottleneck)

It might not be very reliable whatever Windows indicates, but the most important results for everyone are the actual loading times on the Multi of course