Database Info

Is there A-B file copy utility?

Looking for a program to copy files from one flash card to another one.
Just like on a PC with only one floppy disk drive: if you copy a file from A to B, it asks you to insert the source, then the target disk etc. many times depending on the file(s) size(s) and available RAM.
Multiple files handling with subdirectory trees is much appreciated!

If you're going to be re-inserting a new flash card anyway, you might as well temporarily drop the files to your desktop and then copy them back over to the B card. That's all the PC will do anyway, make a temp cache of the files.
Otherwise, get yourself another flash drive or one with two slots.
V

First of all, I mean such a software on my HTC TyTN, or, widely speaking, under WM5.
Then, because it should work on a phone, with limited internal storage space, and for the sake of useability, copying via the internal storage does not work.
I intentionally mentiones how DOS copy/xcopy/diskcopy commands worked between virtual drives: they were reading portions into RAM. You see, it also worked on PCs without a hard drive... you know, there were some...

Ahhm, I am just wondering how do you expect such program to work on your TyTN?
The smallest SD card sold today is 32MB (who buys that any way) and most people use 1 - 2 GB cards. No PPC device available today has enough RAM to hold that much data. In fact RAM is usually even more precious then internal storage.
Theoretically you could do it in portions, but do you really want to copy 2GB worth of data 10 - 20 MB at a time constantly switching between cards?
Floppies are not a good analogy in this case as they are usually about 1.3MB and even computers from 10 years ago had enough RAM to accomodate that.

Internal SD Card

With Froyo, will I be able to save and copy apps to the 13GB internal sd card in the phone, or will it only be to an external sd card.
Thanks in advance

logicrulez said:
With Froyo, will I be able to save and copy apps to the 13GB internal sd card in the phone, or will it only be to an external sd card.
Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You should be able to, but why would you want to? I've got like 160 apps installed most of them high end games (asphalt, assassins creed, home run battle ect.) And I'm only using like 25% of the 2 gigs.

I'm thinking with all my apps, music and video on the internal sd card and off of my phone, my phone should run a little faster.

Ah I see, it might make it slower actually because if you move your apps to the mass media side of the internal memory that side runs at a slower speed so you may have more lag when you load apps. That's why all the lag fixes now don't run off the external SD cards, they are all working inside the super fast 2 gigs where the system resides. Also SSD memory isn't effected by having a near full drive like a normal spindle drive is , it will run just as fast at 90% as it does at 5% where a normal spindle drive would be hurting some at 90%. Hopes that helps clear it up a little

Clienterror said:
Ah I see, it might make it slower actually because if you move your apps to the mass media side of the internal memory that side runs at a slower speed so you may have more lag when you load apps. That's why all the lag fixes now don't run off the external SD cards, they are all working inside the super fast 2 gigs where the system resides. Also SSD memory isn't effected by having a near full drive like a normal spindle drive is , it will run just as fast at 90% as it does at 5% where a normal spindle drive would be hurting some at 90%. Hopes that helps clear it up a little
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Click to collapse
Thanks, so it seems that At&t really did us Captivate owners right in a sense.

logicrulez said:
Thanks, so it seems that At&t really did us Captivate owners right in a sense.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea, they had the right idea. The reason the lag fixes work so good is because when they make the captivate they use a really slow file system for the 2 gigs the file system sits on (Still faster than the mass storage part but no where near where it should be). What the lag fix does it it greats a brand new really fast file system format on that 2 gigs (It's called ext2 or ext4) and moves all the system data there which speeds it up by a ton.

Memory stored on external instead of internal

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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Click to collapse
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.

Surface Pro - installing desktop (and Metro) apps on SDXC card

I already found a thread about installing Metro apps to SD card ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2079596)
I will also need to install a lot of desktop-mode apps (Office, 3 versions of Visual Studio and 2 versions of SQL Server) and I don't think I will have enough space on 128GB SSD. It currently has 84GB available out of the box with nothing installed. My development desktop PC already uses 100 GB of space on C: and it only has 2 versions of Visual Studio and 1 version of SQL Server.
So I think I will have to install some of the software on 64GB SDXC card.
Does anyone have any experience with that? Will it run much slower? I don't think SQL Server is a good candidate. Neither is Visual Studio most likely. But I think MS Office should be fine, just as some other 3-rd party applications.

You can free up some extra space by creating a recovery USB and then deleting/resizing the recovery partition. This gives a nice little boost to the internal storage on the pro.
Why do you need SQL server on both the desktop and the surface, surely you just need it on one machine? Visual studio or SQL server management tools can then access the desktops settings from the pro anyway.
The SD is far slower than the pro's SSD drive though to answer your original question. But the link you show is for metro apps. These are desktop apps. Visual studio never gave me a choice for what drive to install onto, neither did SQL server. So they appear to be stuck on your C drive anyway. Office I don't own, libre-office does the job fine for me and has a smaller install size while having enough compatibility with my original microsoft office files (although complex documents dont always come out well) and is best of all free.

VS does actually ask where you want to install it, but only a portion (three gigs or so of the whole install) will go there; the rest always goes under Program Files.
Depending on the card, microSD isn't necessarily that much slower than internal storage. I mean, it is slower, but the access latencies and read speed will still be pretty fast (as they are for any Flash storage).

I would recommend removing the recovery partition and deleting windows update downloads. I use A 64gb microsdxc, but that's mostly for holding my multimedia and whatnot. If you really need more space, I'd look into opening up the pro and physically changing it to a bigger drive, which is actually not as difficult as it seems.

[Q] About swap space, this device and cyanogenmod

This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.

vanquishedangel said:
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load. The conclusion i drew was the android platform deals to memory management differently than the typical desktop os, due to slower emmc chips used as a boot disk for the majority of android devices using this slow, already bottlenecked memory as swap space doesn't make sense (not to mention the use of 2gb swap space on a limited 16gb storage etc), so android runs almost completely in ram, with stricter memory management and allocation allows android to run fine without swap space, although because of this, androids memory management makes little uses of available swap space

JoinTheRealms said:
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.

_that said:
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh that makes sense. I wasnt sure if swap had an effect directly on the extraction, but seem keeped the rest system more stable/ smooth duing the process in the case of GNU/Linux, with swap off similar operations such as installing packages would more oftern lock the tablet up. Might be a placebo though
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.

JoinTheRealms said:
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just want to share my user experiences on the swap space... It does seem to improve the tf700 with swap space due to the lack of RAM (1GB)..

Thanks for all the useful posts
Thanks for all the posts, I have my sd card on the way. I will post my experience when I get my sd card but I am sure it is safe to say there will be a benefit. I use linux to at home and have 8 gigs of ram on that computer, I lessen the swap after install to about 512mb because 8 gigs is more then enough. I leave some however just incase of any issues like ram going bad. On another computer in the house that has limited ram (1.5 gigs) I have enabled zram (384 mb) and added two old flash cards (1 gig each) to a pci raid card and those were converted to swap. I then altered the fstab to reflect the order of priority I wanted them used in. The reason is that when the swap is used from the hard drive, and the hard drive is being written to, can cause a slow down. So with the 2 flash cards at 1 gig each (the swap seen as 2 gigs) it seemed to speed it up. I just posted that because of the nix users and it seemed like a good plan to run it that way.

Ok, got the sd card
So I recieved the sd card today and applied the swap space to it using root swapper (max setting is 256mb, I figured i can find a way to increase it later if I need to). The defaut location in many of the swap applications will not work on this device however, the sd card mounts at /storage/sdcard1 in my case. So it has to be entered manually (might just be cyanogenmod). Also the device was picky when insalling the card, it would only say blank sd card or cannot read filesystem. I had to install the card in the dock, format it from cwm recovery, (vfat if I remember correct, ext2 and ntfs had issues, avoided ext3 and ext4 cause journaling will cause more wear and tear).
The sd card is a scandisk ultra sdhc uhs-1 8 gigs. From my research that is the fastest this tab can handle. I also use optimising programs like greenify (epic save everything app), pimp my rom (almost every tweak applied), and some pretty efficient tweaks in the settings as well. I also have HALO))) installed and working (epic multiwindow app that works with native programs and almost any rom).
The resuts:
I tested it many ways, I rebooted to see use (none was used because swap starts after boot), I opened apps normally (browsers and things), and it showed 9kb's was used. I then put it to the tests, I open four windows in halo, these were youtube, moonreader pro with a pdf ebook, lecturenotes (awsome note and handwriting app with tons of functions), and Supernote pro (not the best note app). Constantly switched between the apps and messed with settings with them open. The max of swap used was around 10mb(keeping in mind that when I switch windows the app(s) I leave get paused making it hard to tell actual usage because I had to swith the terminal and type "free". I then ran antutu bechmark and gpubench (my tab stills score pretty well) and got a little higher swap usage but not much.
As for the feel of it, it seemed to help when opening many windows in halo, this is the primary reason for my doing this. As for other more normal uses I really didnt see too much of a difference, I did test games however and they did seem a little better (could be placebo) but I am not really sure why they would except android cached other apps to free memory. Reopening apps seemed faster. Also because of apps like greenify my memory usage is decreased so I am sure typically swap would have seen more use.
The conclusion is that at this point I really didn't notice much of a boost for any normal use, but I will definately keep the swap space on due to the boost when using halo and not to mention that I will be updating to android 4.4 soon and it might need more memory. Swap at this point seems more like a pre emptive strike, but it does help with multitasking.

about swap
://androidforums.com/boost-mobile-warp-all-things-root/610449-ram-swapping-without-swapper2.html I actually followed a guide on android central and redid the swap file to 1 gig to swap instead of using a program, this worked better. (add http in front), when i disabled swap it was noticeable that there was a boost. then reenabled it this method.