Now my Microdrive has worse read preformance than my SDHC (6MB/s vs 14MB/s sequential, and similar in random tests), the SDHC falls behind in sequential write speed, and it's absolutely useless in small block random writes. (1/10th the speed of the Microdrive). I might be wrong here, but the advantage in read speeds SHOULD at least put them on the same page, system responsiveness-wise?
However that has not been the case sofar. I'm basically getting 5-15 second hangs with the SDHC. I'm assuming this happens when the SDHC is busy for whatever reason, but it always happens(ex.: Opening My Computer, or entering a folder on the drive), and it doesn't seem to make sense since the read performance is more than twice that of the Microdrive, and I'm not getting these hangs with that. If I had a read/write indicator of some sort I could see what's happening, but I don't really do. The SDHC is a Class 4. To rule things out: Tested with 2 different card readers. Imaged the Microdrive to the SDHC, so the installations were identical. Disabled swap in the SDHC install, no difference. Tried the SDHC install with FAT32, no difference.
Does anyone have any ideas on what could be the cause of this, and if it's possible to improve on it? Am I not taking into account some limitation of SDHC cards? Or is the abysmal random write performance the cause?
.bmp)
Performance: Microdrive VS SDHC
First off, great project :) USBoot got me booting XP off Seagate Microdrive and SDHC on the first try.
Link to speed test
Now my Microdrive has worse read preformance than my SDHC (6MB/s vs 14MB/s sequential, and similar in random tests), the SDHC falls behind in sequential write speed, and it's absolutely useless in small block random writes. (1/10th the speed of the Microdrive). I might be wrong here, but the advantage in read speeds SHOULD at least put them on the same page, system responsiveness-wise?
However that has not been the case sofar. I'm basically getting 5-15 second hangs with the SDHC. I'm assuming this happens when the SDHC is busy for whatever reason, but it always happens(ex.: Opening My Computer, or entering a folder on the drive), and it doesn't seem to make sense since the read performance is more than twice that of the Microdrive, and I'm not getting these hangs with that. If I had a read/write indicator of some sort I could see what's happening, but I don't really do. The SDHC is a Class 4. To rule things out: Tested with 2 different card readers. Imaged the Microdrive to the SDHC, so the installations were identical. Disabled swap in the SDHC install, no difference. Tried the SDHC install with FAT32, no difference.
Does anyone have any ideas on what could be the cause of this, and if it's possible to improve on it? Am I not taking into account some limitation of SDHC cards? Or is the abysmal random write performance the cause?