X-bit labs

27 Card Readers Roundup (page 14)

Category: Multimedia

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 03/23/2008 | 11:11 AM ]

Intel IOMeter Windows Vista ReadyBoost

Alas, the AU6362 still has problems – it passes the test but its result is awful. The other controllers overtake the 2.5MB/s barrier although the AU6377 is but slightly above that mark.

Every controller copes with the writing test easily, excepting for the AU6362. It resembles the test of the SD card.

FC-Test 1.0

Other read diagrams:

• 1x100MB (chart)
• 100x1MB (chart)

Five out of the six readers cope with reading well enough. The AU6362 even tries to show some results, yet it is awfully slow in comparison with the other chips.

Other write diagrams:

• 1x100MB (chart)
• 100x1MB (chart)

The controllers split up at writing: the AU6333, SanDisk MicroMate and SanDisk Extreme are ahead while the AU6377 and SanDisk ImageMate are behind the leaders by 1.5-2GB/s.

FC-Test 2.0

Other read diagrams:

• 1x100MB (chart)
• 100x1MB (chart)

Other write diagrams:

• 1x100MB (chart)
• 100x1MB (chart)

The AU6377 has considerably lower results both at reading and writing in the newer version of the test. The 6362 chip works with SDHC cards but does it too slow. The other chips are equally good with this card format.

Performance with SDHC Cards Summary

So, SDHC cards are no faster than SD. No wonder as the addressing mechanism is the only difference between them – we were not promised any performance benefits. You may have noticed that the speed was generally higher than 6MB/s as guaranteed by Class 6. As for compatibility, the controllers that are declared to support SDHC do work with this format except for the AU6362 with firmware 01.29 that obviously had problems with it.

Now it’s time to discuss MMCplus format that theoretically provides a higher speed than the above-discussed SD and SDHC (290x as opposed to 150x) on the condition that the new format is supported by the card-reader. Otherwise the card will work in MMC compatibility mode, i.e. at a reduced speed.