SDHC vs Hard Drive vs SSD
February 17th, 2008 by antNotebook Review has a solid article that covers and compares SDHC cards, Hard Drives, and SSD storage. They benchmark each type of storage device, and you’re able to see the results. This is good if you’re interested in using SDHC cards as a primary or secondary hard drive in your Eee PC, or if you’re wondering about the Eee PC’s SSD versus a traditional hard drive. You can also read a little more about SDHC comparisons on the EeeUser wiki.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:20 am
While the SSD is much faster and much more expensive, I think that it’s interesting that a standard hard drive averages at 30MB/sec in the access test. (20-40 MB/sec range) as opposed to the max of about 18MB/sec for SDHC.
It’s put into much better perspective when compared to a hard drive. A 33% performance hit for files under 64KB isn’t *so* bad given the low cost, low power consumption, portability, and so on.
I think the review leaves us all waiting for the day of affordable high capacity SSD, but I think as a hard drive replacement we shouldn’t be so disappointed..
February 18th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Is there a limit to how big a card the 4GB EEEPC can handle?
February 18th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Also, how fast is the card reader?
February 18th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Would have been nice if the article compared the SDHC to the EEEPC’s own SSD.
We don’t get to see how much Flash (whether SDHC or built-in) wins by, when you start reading lots of small files - when a HDD would be spending lots of it’s time seeking. Though I guess there’s probably other, non-EEEPC related articles out there that demonstrate that..
Also, it’s a shame the tests being done (hdparm) on the wiki is only for reading. A comparison of write times would be good too - people afraid of wearing out their Flash?
February 18th, 2008 at 5:35 am
why not wearing out your own flash?
HD Tune is free, run the tests and post the results.
February 18th, 2008 at 7:02 am
I read that the SDHC card can be shared / mounted as home or something. Apps can potentially be installed onto it as well. I suppose this should keep the OS running fast from the ssd, while apps/data can sit on the slower sdhc.
Critical apps that are not too big can also sit on the ssd, so this should give the eeepc a good balance of speed and storage.
February 18th, 2008 at 8:19 am
well the most important fact is that SDHC usually hasnt got any wear level
February 18th, 2008 at 8:35 am
You can download HDTune to test the speed of your Eee PC’s SSD, but if I recall correctly my Eee PC’s SSD wasn’t that much faster than my SDHC card … probably because the Eee PC’s drive isn’t a “true” SSD but rather just flash memory that has been soldered to the board.
As far as wear leveling is concerned, I’m 99 percent positive that all class 6 SDHC cards from reliable manufacturers include/support wear-leveling.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:12 am
See the forums for HD Tune benchmarks. http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=39028 has some 4G results and http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=6170 some 2G.
Summary: Eee internal SSD runs around 25MB/s - 29 MB/s compared to the 16 MB/s through the card reader. Access time is 0.4-0.5 ms internal vs 0.8-1.0 ms external.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I just bought a 4GB SDHC Kingston card (Class 4). Can anyone please tell me if this is the right card for my Eee? Sorry for the ignorant question, but this whole discussion is over my head and I just want to know if I need to exchange it for another one like a normal SD card (not HC) or a Class 6 one as above. I can’t find any reference as to the type of card reader in the Eee, like whether it is HC compatible or not. Thanks!!!
February 18th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
@Canuck37 Should work fine! Several other people have reported it working. Just make sure you back it up regularly - particularly if you run an operating system or an application that changes its files frequently from it.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Hey, what I’d love to know is what the heck is plugged into the USB ports in the first photo… at least one of the things is the LogiTech Nano mouse receiver but what is the other one…?
It’s driving me nuts trying to figure that out… nothing I can find on Logitech’s site.
February 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
@Jkafka
SDHC go up to 32GB. So far I have not seen EeePC owners using such high capacity SDHC cards, perhaps due to the fact that 32GB cards are hard to find and expensive, but quite a few EeePC owners seem to be using 16GB SDHC without a problem.
@Steve
Maybe it is this one:
http://trust.com/products/product_detail.aspx?item=15542
Or something similar to it. I remember seeing a similar Bluetooth adapter offered by another manufacturer as well.
February 18th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Hey Milen, yeah you’re pretty close to the mark. I talked to JerryJ over at NBR and he was kind enough to let me in on the secret device…
http://www.cirago.com/docs/html/Cirago_BTA3210.html
When I last went looking for a BT adapter they were much bigger than either of these (and BLUE for some reason).
Looks like I’ll be replacing my LogiTech/VX & wired headset with something a little more 21st century.
Thanks for the suggestion! -Steve-
February 18th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Cool review….
However, how does the performance of Class 6 SDHC cards compare to the mods adding high performance USB flash drives (such as the Corsair Voyager) inside the Eee PC?
Is the performance of the SDHC cards connected to the built-in card reader slower than a stripped Corsair Voyager hard-wired to an internal USB hub?
February 19th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Don’t forget that the EEE SD card reader is bugged. A lot of users experience serious problems with it.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
the card reader is not ‘bugged’ … it’s a SD card reader, period. SDHC is not officially supported, use at your own risk.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
That review is a little iffy because it’s a pure micro-benchmark. SSDs and SDHC have different read speeds but the same access time (zero). What I’d really be interested in is a comparison of, say, boot time or app launch time if you store your OS on each media type.
I’m receiving a 4G Eee soon with a 16G SDHC card — if it works to dump the SSD image onto a SDHC card and boot from there, I might try that and post some timings.
Note that no matter what the results are, SDHC Class 6 is still just fine for most everything. For example, 8Mbps DVD-quality video is still only one MB/s, and even the slowest SD cards benchmarked seem to support reading at at least 7 MB/s. And it’s still far faster than your network and so forth.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
@saab_rider
The latest Corsair Voyager flash USB sticks (the plain ones, not the GT series), are painfully slow. Slower than even class 2 SDHC cards. I am saying this based on my personal experience, but there are also multiple references to the Voyager series poor performance on the Corsair support forums. Corsair Voyager GT series, on the other hand, can be as much as 3-4 times faster than even a class 6 SDHC card in terms of writing speed.
@lordikc
No, the card reader on the EeePC is not bugged. I have used it with three different SD cards (including an SDHC card) with different capacities from three different manufacturer and all three cards work without any problems.
@Molly
I do not know whether SDHC cards are officially supported by the EeePC card reader, but it works flawlessly with my A-Data class 6 SDHC card.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Note that the devices *all* work bad for small data transfers.
As the SDHC cards are USB mass storage, they are just seen as regular disks by the system, so they use a small internal block size (e.g. 512 bytes to 4 Kbytes).
I’m not an expert on the linux internals, but I can imagine the small block size makes that file access is slow
February 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Unfortunately, the Voyager GTs (at least the lower-capacity ones, 8GB and below) and discontinued. No idea why Corsair pulled them, or what they intend to replace them with.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
I have an 8gb Transcend SDHC in the SD reader, formatted with NTFS, on a 4GB 701, running XP. I moved all of “Program Files” and “My Documents” to the SDHC. I have a minimized Mod of Portable Apps installed on it that boots on startup (takes 23 seconds). No problems to date - the SSD gives me about 27 mb burst and the SDHC about 15MB (using HDTACH). Works well.
February 24th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
That sounds great. I hadn’t thought about booting programs on startup from the SD. Pocket PC users have long installed programs on their SD cards that don’t for some reason have to be installed in the flash RAM main “program memory.” I do this with my HP iPAQ hx2795 and my wife, with her HTC Apache (miniSD) and it works fine.
…I just realized that my iPAQ cost the same as an eeePC ….AAAARRRRGH!!… and you can add another $130 for my seldom used Think Outside blue tooth keyboard and mouse…
The Wikipedia SD card page has a pretty good discussion about SDHC. It says devices that don’t specifically support SDHC don’t recognize SDHC cards. I think that means that if your eee recognizes an SDHC card, then that eee, at least, supports them. (Unless they mean that such devices don’t recognize them *as* SDHC cards, but just as SD cards.) Anybody have any thoughts on this?
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Interesting discussion. After comparison shopping I was looking forward to the Cloudbook because the specs seemed interesting but finally picked up a 4G 701 EeePC 2 weeks ago. I immediately installed 2GB of ram and a Patriot 4GB SDHC C6 card. After a week I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu Community site (and some tips here) to install Gutsy. I now have a dual-boot Xandros and Ubuntu EeePC. Grub boots and defaults to Ubuntu, which is totally running off the SDHC card (ext2) with no swap. I was concerned about the multi writes wearing out my SDHC so I figured that with 2GB ram I didn’t need a swap. Maybe I missed something (???) being a n00b but so far everything runs great! I wanted to keep Xandros so I could show friends what it’s all about. Only problem I have at the moment is that if the SDHC is removed I can’t boot Xandros… I ordered a 16GB SDHC. I have since read somewhere that considering the SDHC specs, if I were to use my Eee intensively with swap that I could expect my SDHC to last about 3-4 years… Can’t find that link now…
This is what I posted on a CB forum: “Already said this in another forum but I might as well repeat it here…. I was looking forward to the Cloudbook but finally got an EeePC 4G with webcam. It’s great! I didn’t really like the Xandros OS but decided to keep it anyway so I installed Ubuntu on a 4GB SDHC CL6 (until I get a 32GB) w/2GB ram and Ubuntu works great! I have it dual booting with Xandros. Even with Ubuntu you have to use the Alt+click to move the window sometimes because the 800×480 isn’t a standard screen size, but it’s not a problem. And in most cases you can increase the font size with Ctrl++ to ease eye strain (I need glasses). You will need to tweak it for Ubuntu to recognize some stuff but the Ubuntu community site has it covered and it will probably be the same for the Cloudbook. I also use the small icons in Firefox to get as much screen as possible. BTW, jr accidentally pushed my EeePC off the kitchen table while my back was turned. I heard the crash, picked up my Eee and it was still running fine, just has a scratch on the corner of the lid/screen where it hit the floor, it didn’t even flinch, my mom was talking to me on Skype at the time… Try that with a full size laptop!!! PS: Compiz runs on a standard Ubuntu EeePC install.”
TIP: In Firefox I chose to eliminate the bookmark toolbar, and in the desktop I set the top and bottom taskbars to “solid colour” almost transparent and “Autohide & Expand” and I lowered the pixels, with Compiz full effects. Maybe the 2GB ram helps here? Anyway, this helps increase visible screen space…
Thanks to everyone who posts suggestions and solutions! Without you guys us noobs would be lost…
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Here’s the link:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4258