HP 50g & SD Cards: Performance, Format, Notes

[Claudio L.]

One small note to illustrate the effect of the size and number of clusters on startup time:
I just tested newRPL's new SDHC card support with a Transcend SDHC 16 GB, Class 6, which is supposed to sustain 6 MB/s write on a PC.

A single 16 GB partition formatted in FAT32 (with 8kb clusters, total 1958886 clusters, almost 2M) took newRPL some 7 seconds to mount and calculate the free space.
Compare that with my old 128 MB card with a single 32 MB partition with FAT16 (2kb clusters, total 16322 clusters) at 0.5 seconds.
I believe there's an issue with the clock settings that's not letting me run full speed, I'm getting only 750 kb/sec from the SDHC card and 600 kb/sec from the 128 MB card, but that doesn't invalidate the measurements, as they are both comparable to each other.

Once I confirm/fix the clock speeds I'll run a raw speed test to see if "speed doesn't matter".