Storage Space Vs. Speed

[Kramy]

Well i'm coming from a development point of view. Transferring a new 10MB build takes a seconds on my best cards and sometimes a minute on my slow crappy card (which I put a hammer to). I don't know why there is such a huge difference.

I do. Those crappy cards have write IOPS in the single to double digit range.

So when transferring stuff to it (especially small files), they are painfully slow.

Some of the higher end SD cards have write IOPS over 100. I assume to get 20MB/sec write speeds, like those nice Lexar cards, it'd have to be even higher than that.

 

[Ravnos]

I wouldn't settle for anything but the fastest/best cards. Slow cards will waste more of your time in the future than anything else, and to me time is precious. I'd rather pay a little more and get the best.

Yup waiting 3 seconds for a ROM to load instead of 2 is going to be a real pain in the a**.

Unless your CONSTANTLY swapping data to and from your SD cards, you aren't going to notice the difference between a high speed card and a low speed one.

Well i'm coming from a development point of view. Transferring a new 10MB build takes a seconds on my best cards and sometimes a minute on my slow crappy card (which I put a hammer to). I don't know why there is such a huge difference.
Anyway, the development cycle means that you could be building/testing repeatedly and you don't want to wait - even a few extra seconds gets annoying.

Then it makes sense to get a separate card for development. You can get a fast 1GB card for next to nothing these days, and you're probably not going to need more than that for development. Then you can use a slower, bigger card for stuff that's not likely to get changed out very often, like big romsets or whatever.

 

[SirAileron]

Certainly, you could go slower on the speed for the larger storage cards, but even then, access speed will still impact general performance for a lot of things that are heavily reliant on reading on-the-fly, as opposed to things that buffer and RAM cache. Hell, my DS flash cards perform incredibly differently when you compare a class 2 card to a class 6 card. Saving time can take almost 5 seconds for something as tiny as a 512KB file on a class 2, whereas the time's either cut in half, or instantaneous on a class 6.

So... even considering weighing speed vs storage, it'd be a significant sacrifice to forgo speed in favor of storage capacity (especially with larger cards, which will most certainly store larger files, where access times would be far, far more noticeable).