My Mp Pandora

[skyeyemachine]

My SD card is black. but then again it's also just 16gb. I am experiencing SD card envy

Whether they're blue, black, or key lime, I'm just planning to get a couple of 8-gig class 4 chips myself. Enough to play some music, hold some images and a bunch of docs/ebooks, and house a few applications and games. 16GB total seems pretty damn roomy if you ask me; with 64GB I could hold practically the entire contents of my desktop PC if I were so inclined! But that would cost a lot more than I really want to spend relative to the practical gains.

 

[El Jefe]

whats the internal nand used for? is that just storage of the OS/system files?

 

[MrBlais]

@El jefe... oh yeah..

 

[second exodous]

Blue SD must be a common color, I have 3 brands from 32 megs up to 16 GB and only have one black. Well, two black, I have one micro SD that's black but that won't be used in my Pandora. I have two blue Transcend 16 GB cards and the 32 GB cards that I'm pricing(way too expensive, I'll wait a year or so) are blue also. Looks like I'm a smurf forever.

 

[MDave]

Like I said, black permanent marker pen will solve that. That's what I was planning to do with my 16GB Transcend blue SD card.

 

[darien]

I personally don't think it matters what color your SDs are as long as they're consistent.

 

[MrBlais]

I personally don't think it matters what color your SDs are as long as they're consistent.

No doubt.. AND they don't fail.

 

[kingoddball]

I would like a Green SD card!
Even fluro Pink would kick ass!
Even though colour is not on topic, I thought I would just like to add that!

 

[Elanzer]

Does anyone know fast the NAND is in comparison to the peak bandwidth of the SD interface?

I'm thinking of shelling out for a smaller, super fast 4-8gb card for the OS and then a cheapish 32gb card for everything else, but that whole plan kind of sucks if the NAND is faster than the SD bus ever could be.

 

[mali]

I think the OMAP NAND is way slower than a good SD. There were some tests long ago. I've got a direct comparison on my N800 with OMAP2. The NAND is slower than a Class 2 SD card. After all, this is a relatively moot point, because standby will be the common usage scenario and real booting will be rare, I guess.

 

[BaDToaD]

That's one of the reasons I paid out for SanDisk’s Ultra II 8gb card

As MDave says black marker pen on the end of the SD card. It works surprisingly well

 

[skyeyemachine]

I think the OMAP NAND is way slower than a good SD. There were some tests long ago. I've got a direct comparison on my N800 with OMAP2. The NAND is slower than a Class 2 SD card. After all, this is a relatively moot point, because standby will be the common usage scenario and real booting will be rare, I guess.

If the NAND flash isn't as good as an SD card in most ways, why was that selected as a final component in the boards, versus another kind? Small footprint, low power consumption? Did it come linked to another component? Is it cheaper than other, perhaps more capable varieties of flash? I'm not trying to complain, but as a latecomer to the OpenPandora party who missed the heyday of the debate/part selection process, I'm curious as to the logic behind the final choice for the internal memory. From a practical perspective, the SDs will no doubt be more than enough for my purposes, and in a pinch I can tap into the deeper pockets of a USB hard disk, but I want to make sure I understand the NAND's place in the Pandora user experience and why it was put there, if only so that I don't do something stupid and muck it up.

 

[mali]

I can't really say if it is definitely much slower, but early tests and my OMAP2 experience point in that direction. I suppose the type of NAND is tied to the OMAP3 design and you have to live with what you get when building a device. Having two full sized SD card slots makes it easy to tweak

 

[Awakening]

My 32 GB Kingston is black. Although I kinda like them blue against the black Pandora. Blue is also nostalgic, reminds me of floppy discs. You can also instantly see if they are inside the unit or not, from a distance.

 

[darien]

This is probably a cost and size issue. While there are alternatives that might read faster, the lifetime of that memory won't last long comparatively (wanting to use that space because of better performance won't help there either). Since it's not replaceable, it's better to have something that can stand more writes in its lifetime. Personally I'll be limiting my use of the internal memory when I can (to mostly read-only stuff that won't change much).

You already have 2 slots on the outside to put your own SD in. I don't think it would make sense to put another on the inside without making it accessible on the outside, nor do I think there would even be space for it. It's like a courtesy in my mind, and very necessary to make it even usable for people who can't afford the SD cards right off the bat.

 

[Wheels]

If the NAND flash isn't as good as an SD card in most ways, why was that selected as a final component in the boards, versus another kind? Small footprint, low power consumption? Did it come linked to another component? Is it cheaper than other, perhaps more capable varieties of flash?

That's one of the reasons that NAND Flash won out over the earlier NOR Flash for most things, but the fact is that NAND Flash is also what's inside SD cards, CompactFlash, etc. Almost all the Flash devices you see around (and plenty you don't think about) are NAND these days. But of course, not all NAND chips are created equally, and some are faster than others, especially with good controllers. If the onboard NAND in the Pandora is slower than your average SD card, it may have to do with the cost of the NAND chips (and the chips that go with them) between the two. Cheaper is usually slower.

 

[skyeyemachine]

This is probably a cost and size issue. While there are alternatives that might read faster, the lifetime of that memory won't last long comparatively (wanting to use that space because of better performance won't help there either). Since it's not replaceable, it's better to have something that can stand more writes in its lifetime. Personally I'll be limiting my use of the internal memory when I can (to mostly read-only stuff that won't change much).

You already have 2 slots on the outside to put your own SD in. I don't think it would make sense to put another on the inside without making it accessible on the outside, nor do I think there would even be space for it. It's like a courtesy in my mind, and very necessary to make it even usable for people who can't afford the SD cards right off the bat.

Indeed, putting another SD slot inside the case would probably take more room that it's worth, although I suppose the advantage is that it would be a lot easier to upgrade, or to replace if it died - capabilities I would have much preferred, to be honest, but it's not really a problem. What I was trying to say was not so much 'why the current NAND versus an SD card?' as 'why NAND versus other similar options that might have also fit within the Pandora's footprint?'. Better what's there now than nothing at all, so long as it doesn't cost much more or stretch the Pandora's dimensions any farther, that's for sure, but again, I was asking mostly out of simple curiousity. Thank you all for the helpful responses.

 

[darien]

I remember in the PSP community, the original model only had 32 exclusively for the firmware. It was funny seeing iterations of Custom Firmware being stripped of cool features because they always had to make sure it would even fit. Pretty sure even Sony regretted it, as later models got doubled.

 

[pelrun]

The internal NAND isn't anywhere near as fragile as people make it sound - it just makes sense to treat it carefully since it's not an easily replaceable part.

And as Wheels mentions above - NAND is also the storage in SD cards. It's a bit pointless trying to make generalisations between the speed of NAND and the speed of an SD card without actual hard benchmarks on the platform, as everything depends on the speed of the specific NAND chips used, and the speed of the SD bus hardware.

 

[ari64]

Aw, dang, I was hoping for Majora's Mask as well. Hopefully the emulation gurus can work enough of their magic to bring that one up to full speed...but I can settle for Ocarina of Time in the interim.

(Indeed, I suppose I'll have to! :lol: )

Majora's Mask works, though it uses around 80% of the CPU time without graphics rendering. So either you need to put up with a lot of dropped frames, or overclock, or both.

If you do want to try it, make sure to use the 20091217 version, as earlier versions had a bug that would cause it to crash occasionally.