Class 10 SD cards worth it?

[cuetzpalin]

Hello,

Is it a real benefit from using class 10 (or fastest) cards on the pandora? Say, for emulation of PS and N64?

Thanks!

 

[apersonthinks]

Ps1 games might load a bit faster but neither system will most likely not run any faster. If you want faster read and write speeds, get a class 10. Class 4 works for me though.

 

[Askarus]

Never go below class 10.

I would never buy a lower speed card.

You have to get the PS1 games onto the SD. Do you want to wait for years? They are 700MB each CD.

If you want to try to boot an OS (Slackware) it's a must to go as fast as possible.

 

[kirkanoss]

what is the max the sd slots can read?

 

[Grench]

The Pandora itself tops out around 18MB/sec to/from the SD slots.

I have two Lexar 128GB SDHC class 10 UHS-I cards in mine.  Although 256GB cards exist, I'm not aware of anyone using them in the Pandora.

 

[WizardStan]

Ps1 games might load a bit faster but neither system will most likely not run any faster.

The Playstation had a 300kb/s read speed. A class 2 card would be faster than necessary. In fact, Class 2 would be fast enough to play MP3s, videos, and load PS1 games in real time, start even the largest SNES/Genesis (or other older console) game in 1 second, and N64 games in a few seconds.Furthermore, a class 10 is not guaranteed to be any faster on average than any other class anyway. Class 10 means that it can write a constant stream of data at a minimum of 10MB/s. Class 6 means that it can write at a minimum constant of 6MB/s. To explain further, this means that a Class 10 and a Class 6 might write at 15MB/s average, but sometimes the Class 10 will drop to 10MB/s and sometimes the Class 6 will drop to 6MB/s. The main reason to get a higher class card is if you can't afford to have the write speed drop below a certain threshold, such as when recording live audio or video.

With that in mind, if your concern is about loading games faster (it absolutely will not make the emulator run faster, this will only possibly affect load times) then there isn't any benefit at all.

 

[ZXDunny]

What about swapfiles?

D.

 

[WizardStan]

If you need to use swap space to run your emulator then you probably shouldn't be running that emulator: close a few other programs first, recover the memory.

 

[MrBazil2k]

Im using the Pretec Class 16 Cards which are listed in EDs - DragonBoxShop.

To be honest .. I do not really have an idea if they are faster than the class 10 cards at all.

Its not like I can say : "Woah... what a difference"

But they are working good so far...

Slackware runs via SanDisk Class 10 Cards and that OS boots up very fast as well... so I have no idea about the difference ^^

Like "Askarus" wrote above it was important for me as well to transfer huge data-blocks from and toward the SD-Cards without waiting ages to pass...

 

[laurencevde]

There's little to no difference between class6 and class10. For a long time, class6 was simply the highest speed-class defined... However, by now, <class10-cards are mostly just old cards, and not really any cheaper than class10's (they start at ~.50/.60Eur/GB).

Any decent modern SD-card should be able to saturate the SD-bus during sequential read/write and random read. The only card I know of with useable random-write-speeds (important for OS or swap-use) is the Sandisk Extreme (HD-video) (which got relabeled from class6 to class10 to HD video). Any card more expensive than that is, for the Pandora, a waste of money.

Oh, and the high-speed (>40MB/s)-cards put multiple chips in parallel, which has the negative effect of increasing minimum write/erase-sizes, slowing down random writes...

 

[ekianjo]

class 10, if not it takes forever to transfer files from PC to the card. Just for that, it's worth it. 

 

[White Demon]

Unless you're running an alternate OS from the SD card or constantly copying files to it, it's not worth the extra money.

I'm using a couple of class 2 32GB cards and have no noticable difference in speed on the Pandora at all, wether playing games/emulators or watching movies.

The only time I notice the lack of speed is when copying a few Playstation isos or a movie from my PC, and generally then I'm not in a hurry.

 

[F_Slim]

I'm running Slackware on a Class 6 card without problems. Probably the file-system used has a much larger impact on performance than the difference between class 6 and class 10:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/8885-filesystem-shootout/

 

[Jenseits]

Can hardly measure a difference between my Class 10 and (good quality) Class 4 cards...

Read speed maxes out on both more or less... Didnt test write speed...

Be aware that most propably you won't feel any difference no matter for which purpose.