Waiting for my Hero. Comparing memory card speeds

SanDisk MicroSDHC 8GB Class 6A particularly geeky post, even for me. As I wait for my Hero this morning I've been running some disk benchmarking on the micro SDHC memory cards I have around here.

Disk Benchmark Results
DeviceAverage Write SpeedAverage Read Speed
1GB Class 2 SanDisk Micro SD 3.8 MB/s 8.4 MB/s
4GB Class 4 SanDisk Cruzer USB Stick 6.78 MB/s 13.3 MB/s
8GB Class 6 SanDisk Micro SDHC 11.9 MB/s17.4 MB/s
For Comparison
Desktop HDD (whilst in use)
 ~25 MB/s~70 MB/s

That is quite a significant difference between the devices. The 8GB Class 6 Micro SDHC that I purchased for the HTC Hero really looks to be exceptionally quick for a SS memory card.

Baring in mind that smartphones are doing a lot of read AND writes to their main storage because of the wealth of applications, background processes and more over, swap file requirements, especially of the Android platform, I'm expecting this to have a significant difference in the general response of the phone. The swap file in particular will require plenty of read and write throughput when the device is in use, especially when the device is loaded up and is more and more reliant on that file.

Luckily I'll have TWO HTC Heroes here today, which means I'll be able to do a side-by-side comparison between using the 2GB Class 2 (?) Micro SD card that comes with the device, and the replacement 8GB Class 6 Micro SDHC card. For the sake of £14.99 which included a small USB card reader it's barely a price to pay for what I hope to be a significant difference in user experience.


InterestingPhones
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:50