Comments on: SDHC vs Hard Drive vs SSD

By: Someone

Someone — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:32:01 +0000

I just tried out that benchmark program on my EEEPC 1000H. Apparently I get a bit a better write speed for small file sizes, but for large files the reading spead wont top 14502 MB/s which is quite a bit lower than in the test. tough of course I do not know, how relevant this actually is.

http://img18.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bench1.gif

First I wondered wether they might have used the SLC model, but I looked at the photograph again. It should be the same card, they used.

Though I suspect I got that wear leveling thing wrong; I can’t find any indication, the 8gb Transcend Card supports it (I had mistaken that to be claimed for both cards tested in the article).

I wonder, how it will perform as a boot disc?

By: mike

mike — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:01:55 +0000

will nice discussion ,I want to know how can i compare between SSD ,SDHC and HDD in capacity (volume per bit),if any one know ,please help.

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:39:49 +0000

Here’s the link:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4258

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:06:01 +0000

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…

By: DougC-3

DougC-3 — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:05:38 +0000

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?

By: creddy

creddy — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:10:26 +0000

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.

By: geoelectric

geoelectric — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:47:49 +0000

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.

By: eFfeM

eFfeM — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:16:54 +0000

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

By: Milen

Milen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:25:27 +0000

@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.

By: Randall

Randall — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:42:46 +0000

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.