I want to have maximum performance from my mini sd card.I heard that formatting it in an appropriate way would increase its performance.By performance i literally mean that the transfer rates are increased.Like when i am moving some big songs and transferring big fies via pc.
I had a magician before and it would take less time to copy a 650mb file than my hermes,
So any body tell me can i do anything to get higher transfer rates?
I mean fat ot fat32? And the allocation unit size?
I dont care if i have to sacrifice my space for performance
Have you found out anything about how to format your card or if there are any new drivers for better performance?
I'm on a Blackstone.
the program pocketmechanics let you benchmark sd cards and compare the result with other cards
What exactly is the problem? Im thinking of getting the focus and I keep hearing these SD card issues but what "exactly" is the problem? I understand that once you put it in, your SD card is done, and that if you want to remove it you have to wipe everything, I understand all that, but what are the problems that arise? I have a 16gb micro sd that I have used on all my devices no problem, do files get corrupted or something? Does it just not read it?
There aren't any problems in that sense. The only real "problem" is that not all MicroSD cards work with WP7. In addition, hot-swapping isn't supported, because in effect, the MicroSD's memory is added to the internal memory, and the system then doesn't differentiate between storing on the sd card and that that's built into the phone, and thus stuff is spread all over all of them.
There aren't any "problems" as such that I know of though.
On an ending note - WP7 is awesome ^__^ Honestly the best user experience I've ever had with a phone (esp. having come from Android >.<) ^__^
loading a microSD card will turn it into a secure card. once this happens no other device will even read it (except a nokia n8) making it extremely difficult to format if it doesn't work nicely with windows phone 7. That is the main issue. rest already mentioned.
GenkaiMade gave his version which is correct but I thought I would explain it my way.
Take your average memory card and device. What are some of the default expectations you have when using one?
1) You should be able to get any MicroSD card on the market and be able to put it into your phone with it working.
2) You should be able to remove the memory card from the device and put it in a different device (such as another phone or PC) and have it still work like normally.
The problem with Windows Phone 7 is that it breaks these two rules.
1) Many of the higher rated MicroSD card flat-out don't work on WP7. This is because of the method WP7 uses to read/write to memory card. You can find more specific details on why this is but I will just keep it simple. There are many user-created lists which list which MicroSD cards do work with WP7.
2) You can NOT hot-swap your memory card once it is inserted into phone. Why? SD stands for Secure Digital which means there is a security aspect capable on the card. Microsoft takes advantage of this in WP7. Once you put your new card in your phone automatically reformats and locks it down. If you then take out the card and place it in another phone or a PC it will not be recognized, almost as if it is invisible. And the worst part, there is nothing* you can do about it. Once you pair a memory card and WP7 phone they are joined for life.
Why does this suck? If you buy a 8GB card now you simply can't upgrade to a 16/32Gb one down the road without losing all of your data and having a useless MicroSD card. The old card would become a better Frisbee than data storage device. This is why most WP7 phones don't let the users have access to the memory card. Microsoft knew this would happen and thus pushed manufacturers to not have the card easily accessible. There is even much talk that the memory card in the Samsung Focus was meant to be glued to the phone to prevent swapping but somewhere along the line that idea was scrapped.
* Note: Technically there is ONE thing you can do. If you own or have access to a Nokia N8 phone it can read the locked down MicroSD card and reformat to something any device can recognize. Essentially undo the problem. But how many people have easy access to one? The answer, almost nobody.
Quicksilver4648 said:
GenkaiMade gave his version which is correct but I thought I would explain it my way.
Take your average memory card and device. What are some of the default expectations you have when using one?
1) You should be able to get any MicroSD card on the market and be able to put it into your phone with it working.
2) You should be able to remove the memory card from the device and put it in a different device (such as another phone or PC) and have it still work like normally.
The problem with Windows Phone 7 is that it breaks these two rules.1) Many of the higher rated MicroSD card flat-out don't work on WP7. This is because of the method WP7 uses to read/write to memory card. You can find more specific details on why this is but I will just keep it simple. There are many user-created lists which list which MicroSD cards do work with WP7.
2) You can NOT hot-swap your memory card once it is inserted into phone. Why? SD stands for Secure Digital which means there is a security aspect capable on the card. Microsoft takes advantage of this in WP7. Once you put your new card in your phone automatically reformats and locks it down. If you then take out the card and place it in another phone or a PC it will not be recognized, almost as if it is invisible. And the worst part, there is nothing* you can do about it. Once you pair a memory card and WP7 phone they are joined for life.
Why does this suck? If you buy a 8GB card now you simply can't upgrade to a 16/32Gb one down the road without losing all of your data and having a useless MicroSD card. The old card would become a better Frisbee than data storage device. This is why most WP7 phones don't let the users have access to the memory card. Microsoft knew this would happen and thus pushed manufacturers to not have the card easily accessible. There is even much talk that the memory card in the Samsung Focus was meant to be glued to the phone to prevent swapping but somewhere along the line that idea was scrapped.
* Note: Technically there is ONE thing you can do. If you own or have access to a Nokia N8 phone it can read the locked down MicroSD card and reformat to something any device can recognize. Essentially undo the problem. But how many people have easy access to one? The answer, almost nobody.
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You're wrong. It has nothing to do with what you said. Lol @ breaking rules. They aren't breaking anything...
SD Card DRM is in the spec, it is only given to people who license it. That's what WP7 uses. It's locks down the storage system with a DRM key and that's why other devices (barring Nokias) can't see it - most SD Card clients don't support SD Card DRM.
Nokia (Symbian, and maybe Maemo, but I'm unsure on that) is the only other mobile OS that supports it, and that's why it can reformat the card (but cannot read any data on it, of course, since it doesn't have the decryption key). When you power on the phone, the WP7 pre-boot environment unlocks the card via a key on the device the same way you unlock an encrypted system drive on a PC. If a device cannot supply this key, they cannot mount the card.
If you swap the card, you have to hard reset the device because the storage is spanned and the decryption key on the device no longer corresponds to the SD card in the device (but due to spanned storage the device would malfunction even if it were to boot up). The new card is encrypted and added to the pool on a hard reset, and the [new] key is put on the device so that it can be mounted when the device is powered on.
It's pretty damn simple, and has been written in plain English in many threads; yet people still FAIL to understand it.
Have you ever thought there must be a reason why they call them SECURE Digital Cards? Or did you think Secure = taking it out one device and just plugging it into the other and taking the data off of it?
The Storage in WP7 was never meant to be swappable. Microsoft has always said it would not be. It's your own business if you want to play around swapping cards like Russian Roulette.
As far as which work with WP7. It requires higher Random I/O speeds than most SD Cards provide, and that doesn't correspond to Class Type. Also, a card can work fine for sometimes weeks at a time and then start to fail, so replacing it yourself is at your own risk.
And most manufacturers and carriers will void you warranty if you mess with the SD Card.
In that respect using memory cards is nonsense on WP7.
If you cannot do what you want with this, what was a rule and still is a rule on the market today,
they should just build devices with inbuilt memory like iPhone and don't talk about memory cards anymore. That would be simple.
Current situation is a mess.
So what cards are compatible now? I Googled it and the first response was 'San Disk Pulls WP7 compatible memory cards' and I figured that wasn't a good sign.
williammel said:
So what cards are compatible now? I Googled it and the first response was 'San Disk Pulls WP7 compatible memory cards' and I figured that wasn't a good sign.
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they only pulled it because MS wants to do official testing and release an official list.
refer to this webpage for more info: http://mobilitydigest.com/the-sd-cards-that-dodont-work-with-windows-phone/
Here it is in KB form from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
N8ter said:
You're wrong. It has nothing to do with what you said. Lol @ breaking rules. They aren't breaking anything...
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It was a figure of speech. I know Microsoft didn't break any real "rules". This is what I posted:
Quicksilver4648 said:
...
What are some of the default expectations you have when using one?
...
The problem with Windows Phone 7 is that it breaks these two rules.
...
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Click to collapse
When I said "rules" I implied "expectations". Microsoft did nothing wrong, outside of communicating with the end users, with how WP7 manages MicroSD cards.
And I clearly know why certain MicroSD cards will or wont work. I just didn't feel like explaining it because it would take a lot of time.
It's time to start expecting people to use these technologies in a secure manner.
The media industry does not support platforms that leave them open to be attacked by software pirates.
Information is power, and no one likes their info stolen.
There are many reasons.
iOS phones encrypt their storate. And the reason why they don't support external storage cards is probably the same reason why Microsoft uses the SD-DRM and encrypts the WP7 storage.
I don't know how Symbian handles its storage, but I'm pretty sure that OS at least supports Encrypting the file system on SD cards. It supports pretty much everything ele.
Right, let me give my own perspective on this.
Until recently I was a WM6 user. I regularly upgraded my phone, and the last one was an HD2. WM phones never came with any real amount of storage, just a piffling amount of internal memory (what, 500MB?). I was therefore faced with the added cost and hassle of having to purchase a memory card and insert it into the phone. This was a bit like buying a PC without a hard disk and having to buy and install your own. It was an added hassle and expense.
Once you had your SD card inserted, you were then faced with the decision of where to store the data for each of your apps. Take email - do you store all your emails and attachments on the internal memory, thus using up a good chunk of that precious resource, but having it work quickly, or do you store it all on the SD card, where there's a lot more room but it's slow and clunky, and if anyone steals your phone they can pop the card out and get at the data? When you install apps, you're again given the choice of where to install it. Do you go for the speed of internal storage? Do you put it on the SD card, knowing if you ever pop out the card, your app will be unavailable? Decisions, decisions.... Too much damned complexity. The average user shouldn't be faced with these choices, if I install an app, it should just go on the phone wherever, period.
Not only that, once my card was in there, I never once removed it. The majority of my apps were on it, my emails, and all my media. I totally filled it with media. Popping out that card would more or less break my phone. My apps wouldn't work, my emails would be missing......so I never did. Nor did I ever use it as a mass storage drive....because there was never any free space on it. Instead I had a 32GB USB memory key hanging from my keychain - that was my portable mass storage solution.
Not only this, if I wanted to put media onto the card, I had to connect to the PC and drag and drop my stuff directly onto the phone. What a hassle! Doing this didn't optimize the size of the photos for the phone's screen. It didn't drop the bitrate of my mp3s, it didn't convert videos to the right size and format. All that had to be done manually, and I never bothered, so my media took up a lot more room than it had to. So inefficient.
So, given that I never removed the card, and that doing so would hose my phone, and that it was always full, so never got used as mass storage, and that it was insecure, and an added expense and hassle, and putting media on the card was a manual process, what would I have done in a next generation phone to cure all these issues?
Well, I would have made sure the phone came with plenty of onboard memory, and I would have removed the distinction between internal memory and the "card" so it was all one storage container. I would have secured the memory so even if it could be removed, the data couldn't be read in another device. I would have made sure the memory was fast enough to deal properly with a modern OS. I would automate the process of converting and downsizing media by using software on the PC to automatically perform those tasks. I'd also make the process wireless and fully automatic. I'd.......oh wait, that's what Microsoft already did in WP7.
So I'm happy, even if you lot ain't.
I just got 2 Focus's for the Wife and I. Using the SD card sticky in the Focus forum here as a general help, I purchased a PNY 8Gb C4 for the Wifes, and a Patriot 16Gb C2 for mine (Frys, and the Patroit was the last one in the store from the Display! No one buys C2 anymore).
The back overlay on both devices mentions memory cards, and quick startup quide shows you how to install them and what happens if you remove them.
I put the Cards in last night (phones just arrived yesterday), formatted (hold the Power/Camera/Vol Down at the same time, answer questions) and in a few seconds each system was formated. Both are working fine right now.
Right now though doesn't mean much, many in the SD thread are having issues after several weeks, though it seems it more prevalent with the 32Gb cards. YMMV...
What I find goofy about the whole thing is that it has been stated that 7 needs random read/write, which is not measured by class rating, and can vary even within the same type of card, but very few people have posted numbers showing that they tested their cards at all before gleefully sacrificing them to the hungry maw of the Focus. Seriously guys, do more testing and post more numbers before rendering your cards unreadable to a PC. It'll help us all to better understand what works and what doesn't.
This bites.. I always knew that the card inside the wp7 was secured, but I always had faith in the power of this forum. Especially in recovery situations. Now I have lost a lot of irreplaceable data, like dozens of pictures of my young child. It seems I had a little too much faith.
Thank you for this information. it was very helpful. I have already moved away from Windows phones to android, and am going to start using nandroid. Hopefully this won't happen again.
When formatting hard drive, what's the best allocation size for the TF?
Are you talking in response to the hard mod for an actual HDD in the dock?
Or more along the lines of the MicroSD?
Either way, the only way to best determine the proper allocation size for your storage is to find out the average file size for your entire collection of files you plan on storing on said storage medium...
I store mostly movies, audio books, and a Windows toolkit, I dont remember what it was at the time I last checked, but for optimum performance I went with 64kb blocks, I had forgotten to do this a good 2 weeks after I got my TF, and once I did I noticed that when I opened MortPlayer for my audio books it resumed faster then before, and playing videos going from selection to playing was faster as well...
Then again, there isnt a single MicroSD who has an exact mirror image! I have multiple cards, and no matter the class, matching or not, size matching or not, or even MFG (IE 2 identical cards, 2 16GB Class 4 from my HD2's)
If I where you, and if I had a really good media reader for my PC (something not UNDER $20... dont ask, they suck, nuff said), id take my MicroSD (or a good dock in the case of an actual HDD) and run it through CrystalDiskMark a few times each time after formatting it in the desired partition layout/allocation size...
Then again, do you want IOPS or R/W to be your main concern...
Whatever, I am falling asleep here while typing this so im sure its going to be a disaster to read +/ understand... Maybe if I have time before work in the morning Ill check the thread and try to clarify...
by the way, +/ is AND OR... just like w/ is with and w/o is without... er + is always and or plus anyway... / is the or... ORRRRRR (dear god i need to go to sleep before I hurt myself or my reputation anymore with this post...)
i just thought about ROM's made to store memory on SD cards instead of being stored internaly. can anyone explain y it wouldnt work or y anyone hasnt done it yet?
also wanted to add, by doing this change of memory storage it would speed up the system by 50%. it would also be a + for people who play video games on their smart phones Zonia, Inotia, MMO's ect"""
An SD card, or any format of memory card for that matter, can only be used for the storage of data. It behaves like a hard disk. Data on it must be serially 'read' into a main memory buffer, before it can be accessed by your device's processor.
You can't replace 'real' memory with it or try to use it as real memory.
hijack562 said:
doing this change of memory storage it would speed up the system by 50%
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why?
10 characters
so cant you partition a sd card to be used as real memory? or can it be possible to compress real memory?
and why you ask? cuz it would be nice to play games on a smart phone that only comes with 200mb or less memory. but has a fairy decent processor
Too Slow
The reason they don't do that is because SD cards are MUCH slower than memory. the fastest SD cards (Class 10) only transfer data at 10 MB/s. Memory on the other hand transfers data in the range of gigabytes per second. Even if the memory used a very "slow" rate of 1GB/s that is still 100x faster than a SD card is.
really?? a class 10 only reads 10mb per sec?? dam thats slow...but isnt a sd card consider a soild state drive or not?
Take a close look at an SD card. It only has 9 pins on it. In standard mode two of them aren't used, leaving 7. After 1 x Chip Select, 1 x Power, 2 x Ground, and 1 x Clock, that leaves two pins - namely 1 x Data In and 1 x Data Out.
Not a 32 bit data/address bus like an x86 or ARM processor, but a single, one bit wide bus.
A byte of stored data comes out of the Data Out line as 8 bits, one at a time.
Commands to the card, to ask it to retrieve/store the data you want, have to be sent down the Command/Data In line the same way. Data to be written to the card goes in down the same Data In line the same way, again one bit at a time.
Even though the clock rate can, in theory, be wound up to 25Mhz, it is still a tedious process to get data in and out of the thing.
True solid state drives use the SATA interface, a different type of interface, still serial as above, but the clock rates are much, much higher allowing 1.5 to 6.0 GBit/s transfer rates.
Memory cards can be considered solid state drives, just damned slow ones.
Sorry if this isn't directed towards OP but since we are talking about SD cards anyways I thought I'd ask. Any way to tell what class your SD card is? I have a 16GB one so I'm assuming its class 10.
New cards have the class number on the label, as Class n, or as a capital 'C' with the class number in it.