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June 20, 2006

Secure Digital Card Speed Comparison in Treo 700p

In two previous posts - Treo 650 SD Slot is teh Fastar (February, 2005) and SanDisk Extreme III Secure Digital SD Card (March, 2005) - I compared the speeds of four Secure Digital cards in three Palm OS devices.

Well, it's been 16 months and newer devices and higher capacity cards are now out, so I thought I'd run some more comparisons. This time, however, I'll be using the new Palm Treo 700p along with its venerable brothers, the 650 and 600.

The four SD cards being tested here are:

L to R: Adata 150X 4GB, SanDisk 133X Extreme III 1GB, SanDisk Ultra II 66X, SanDisk 512MB

Here are the results using VFSMark v1.1 (notice that the 4GB Adata card was not tested in the Treo 650 or 600 -- those devices do not come with support for FAT32 file systems required for 4GB cards):

Treo Model:	700p	700p	700p	700p	650	650	650	600	600	600
SD Card	Adata 150X 4GB	SanDisk Extreme III 133X 1GB	SanDisk Ultra II 66X 2GB	SanDisk 512MB	SanDisk Extreme III 133X 1GB	SanDisk Ultra II 66X 2GB	SanDisk 512MB	SanDisk Extreme III 133X 1GB	SanDisk Ultra II 66X 2GB	SanDisk 512MB
File Create	206	433	70	89	369	69	169	257	63	137
File Delete	52	210	42	80	182	42	73	151	39	69
File Write	128	237	77	63	220	76	61	155	16	54
File Read	786	814	814	773	682	682	653	179	173	168
File Seek	2950	2950	2950	2950	786	842	786	421	421	406
DB Export	92	216	41	60	216	44	63	123	35	46
DB Import	98	103	99	101	419	426	412	448	438	419
Record Access	1206	1131	1096	1096	822	754	786	362	338	332
Resource Access	1163	1200	1163	1097	800	752	738	352	333	331
VFSMark	742	810	705	701	499	409	415	272	206	218

I think a few conclusions can be made from these data. First, the SanDisk Extreme III is a very fast card. At a rated speed of 133X, it bested even the 150X Adata card overall.

Second, the added expense of their Ultra II line above and beyond the price of SanDisk's standard (blue) line of SD cards appears to be wasted if used in a Treo. There's just no appreciable bump in speed. Maybe on a PC -- didn't test that here, so can't generalize -- but not on a Treo.

Third, the 700p looks like it has faster access to SD cards than its predecessors, which is good news. Not only can it handle FAT32-formatted cards (up to 4GB), it reads faster than the 650 and 600 and writes much faster than the 600 (but about the same as the 650).

So, if you rely on card-intensive apps, you may want to consider the combination of a Treo 700p and a SanDisk Extreme III as a pricey, but effective, upgrade.

Posted by Craig in Mobile & PDAs and Phones

Comments

Posted by: Renee at June 20, 2006 12:54 AM

Posted by: Abe Frohman at November 29, 2007 10:29 PM

Posted by: Robert Stever at May 1, 2008 4:51 PM

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